Measuring the Effects of Non-Tariff Barriers in Exchange Rates, Positive List System, and Import Quotas in the International Trade — Cases of Agricultural Imports in Japan

Abstract

Along with the strong propositions of freer bilateral or multilateral trade advocated by numerous trade organizations, traditional customs tariffs have been reducing or even cutting down in recent years. However, more and more non-tariff barriers to trade (NTBs) are prevailing and attracting attentions from policy makers and academic researchers nowadays. As a matter of fact, there are large amounts of policy measures can be regarded as NTBs which refer to all the measures that can distort the trade excluding tariffs. This dissertation attempts to study the influence of NTBs and quantitatively measure the effects of NTBs on trade flows and welfares based on the analyses of some trade policies and empirical trade data. As mentioned already, there are actually many categories of NTBs, and in the process of selecting objects as the study issues, two principles are followed. One of the principles is that those NTBs to be discussed in this dissertation should be hot and controversial topics in recent years and thus are worthy to do research. Moreover, the other principle is that those NTBs to be analyzed should have the impacts on agricultural product trade and distort the agricultural trade flows. Therefore, three kinds of NTBs—foreign exchange rate control, positive list system, and import quota are chosen to be studied in this dissertation. In fact, the models constructed in this research can be applied to analyze many kinds of NTBs, and hereinto the above three policy cases are taken into consideration and empirically examined their effects on agricultural trade. The first study focused on China’s exchange rate reform. In order to protect local industries and weaken the exporting advantages of China, many countries have begun to put much pressure on the appreciation of Chinese currency. In the context of huge pressures from many countries, in July 2005, China decided that Chinese currency yuan would no longer only be pegged to U.S. dollar but move into a managed floating exchange rate regime with reference to a basket of currencies. Although exchange rate had been paid much attention by economists since long time ago, yet nowadays this topic is still popular and moreover, now the study subjects become focusing on exchange rate volatility instead of exchange rate itself. Therefore,