The impact of food safety standards on the export of Chinese vegetable products —— A study based on the Belt and Road cooperation framework

Abstract

Agricultural products' tradeexpands between China and the countries along the Belt and Road while the cooperation is developing rapidly. Meanwhile, the countries' food safety standards along the Belt and Road are becoming more stringent for China's vegetable products. As one of the leading products exported by China's agricultural products, this article presents a quantitative study on whether food safety standards impact Chinese vegetable products' export. The quantitative model in the article takes food safety standards, the output volume of vegetable products in the exporting country, the economic size of the importing country, the geographical distance between the importing and exporting countries, the tariff level of the importing country, and the membership of the FTA as the independent variables, and the export scale of Chinese vegetable products to the countries along the Belt and Road as the dependent variable. The article investigates the impact of food safety standards in countries along the Belt and Road on Chinese vegetables' exports by applying the extended gravity model to 2017. In the empirical analysis, after combining the F-test, LM-test, and Hausmann test, the article chooses to use the fixed-effects model to regress the data. The empirical results show that the improvement of food safety standards set by countries along the Belt and Road in 2006-2017 does not significantly impact the export of Chinese vegetable products, and the relevant food safety standards set by China for vegetable products are relatively high. The importing country's economic size, the importing country's tariff level, and the FTA membership are the significant factors influencing China's export of vegetable products. Finally, based on the findings, this paper puts forward corresponding countermeasures and suggestions.