Transforming Agricultural Trade: The Role of Multilayer Bilateral Relations in China's Import Patterns

With the development of the market economy, agricultural trade has become more and more significant for the development of the agricultural economy, which has triggered people's further thinking and exploration on the impact of agricultural trade on agricultural carbon emissions. This paper takes the measurement of trade implied carbon as the carbon dioxide emission index under the impact of agricultural trade and analyzes the impact of trade implied carbon and implied carbon balance on carbon emission. Taking the impact of Sino-US agricultural trade as an empirical background, this paper measures the impact of environmental changes in agricultural trade opening on China's agricultural development and its carbon emissions, so as to predict changes in China's regional agricultural carbon emissions performance. After calculation, it is found that the scale of China's exports has decreased by 0.089%, which is lower than the decline of 0.361% in the United States. The trade conflict has a significant impact on China's import and export structure. Under the scenario of mutual tariffs on agricultural products, China's exports to the United States are expected to decrease by 6.28%, while China's imports from the United States decreased by 13.02%. The Sino-US agricultural trade dispute will reduce China's carbon emissions by 0.013% and the United States' carbon emissions by 0.024%, which is related to the negative impact on the economy. Improving the performance of agricultural carbon emissions is not only the need for the green and sustainable development of the agricultural economy but also conducive to improving the international competitiveness of agricultural products.

PurposeThe trade cost is a significant factor which restricts the trade potential between two nations. This paper aims to make a measurement of agricultural bilateral trade costs of China.Design/methodology/approachBased on Novy model, this paper makes a measurement of agricultural bilateral trade costs before and after China joining the WTO (1995‐2007).FindingsThis paper finds that China's agricultural trade costs with its five major trade partners have not got a pronounced downward trend during 1995‐2007. In ascending order, these are: Malaysia, the USA, Japan, Brazil and Argentina in 2007. Otherwise, there is an obvious corresponding relationship between the trade potential and costs of agricultural products, which is that high costs lead to inadequate trade. With a simple regression, distance and free trade agreement are found to be main factors influencing agricultural trade costs.Originality/valueBased on the revised gravity model, this paper especially calculates the agricultural bilateral trade costs before and after China joining the WTO, which expands the understanding of trade costs in an industrial perspective. It can prove the agricultural market opening extent, and also help us to learn more about how China participates in the division of the world farm produce market.

PurposeThe outbreak of the novel COVID-19 virus has spread throughout the world, causing unprecedented disruption to not only China's agricultural trade but also the world's agricultural trade at large. This paper attempts to provide a preliminary analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on China's agricultural importing and exporting from both short- and long-term perspectives.Design/methodology/approachThis study seeks to analyze how the outbreak of COVID-19 could potentially impact China's agricultural trade. With respect to exports, the authors have pinpointed major disruptive factors arising from the pandemic which have affected China's agricultural exports in both the short and long term; in doing so, we employ scenario analysis which simulates potential long-term effects. With regard to imports, possible impacts of the pandemic regarding the prospects of food availability in the world market are investigated. Using scenario analysis, the authors estimate the potential change in China's food market—especially meat import growth—in light of the implementation of the newly signed Sino-US Economic and Trade Agreement (SUETA).FindingsThe results show that China's agricultural exports have been negatively impacted in the short-term, mostly due to the disruption of the supply chain. In the long term, dampened external demand and potential imposition of non-tariff trade barriers (NTBs) will exert more profound and lasting negative effects on China's agricultural export trade. On the other hand, despite panic buying and embargoing policies from some exporting and importing countries, the world food availability and China's food import demand are still optimistic. The simulation results indicate that China's import of pork products, in light of COVID-19 and the implementation of SUETA, would most likely see a sizable climb in quantity, but a lesser climb in terms of value.Originality/valueAgricultural trade in China has been a focal-point of attention in recent years, with new challenges slowing exports and increasing dependence on imports for food security. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic adds significant uncertainty to agricultural trade, giving rise to serious concerns regarding its potential impact. By exploring the impact of the unprecedented pandemic on China's agricultural trade, this study should contribute to a better understanding of the still-evolving pandemic and shed light on pertinent policy implications.

Purpose - Free Trade Agreement (FTA) has been considered an important trade strategy in international trade since the WTO system in 1995. In response, Korea has been actively pursued the FTA, but damage from the FTA is reported in the agricultural sector. Design/methodology/approach - Under these circumstances, the main purpose of the study is to analyze the relationship between FTA signed by South Korea and agricultural trade. To analyze this, the study investigated 43 countries that are important in terms of FTA and agricultural trade with Korea from 2004 to 2017. Also, based on augmented gravity model, this study conducted three kinds of econometric procedures such as Generalized Least Square (GLS), fixed/random effect model, and dynamic panel estimation. Findings - The main results are as follows. First, the FTA signed by South Korea has had a positive effect on agricultural trade with the other country, especially the FTA has had a more sensitive impact on imports than on the country’s agricultural exports. In addition, the trade diversion effects was greater than the effect of trade creation effects related to agricultural products through the FTA. Research implications - Therefore, we need continuous efforts to investment on Korean agricultural sectors and to enhance agricultural productivity. Also, there is a need for ways to increase the utilization of FTA.

Agricultural trade policies in the new millennium

Vietnam's agricultural exports to China have remained strong, with the country maintaining its position as the top destination for Agri-products. This article primarily utilizes the Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) Index, and Trade Complementarity (TC) index to examine the trade comparative advantage, and the complementary of twenty major agricultural products between China and Vietnam from 2012 to 2021. The study results showed that Vietnam and China frequently exchange agricultural products. Vietnam has more stronger competitiveness than China in terms of agricultural products. China's exports to Vietnam were highly complementary to Vietnam's imports in category 0 whiles Vietnam's exports to China showed strong complementarity with China's imports in category 2. This paper analyzes the complementarity and comparative advantages of agricultural trade between China and Vietnam, and proposes informed suggestions for policy-making to promote agricultural trade between the countries. The proposed suggestions aim to expand agricultural trade between the two countries, reduce the trade imbalance, and achieve mutual benefit and win-win results.

The evolution of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been conditioned by a number of factors. Among them is the so-called external aspect of the CAP on which this work focuses, being the main objective to analyze the relationship between the evolution of the CAP and the negotiations leading to the liberalization of international agricultural trade, which were held within the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the same way, we also consider the consequences for European agricultural foreign trade derived from the commitments assumed by the European Union (EU) in those two negotiating forums. To achieve these objectives, this research proposes two working lines: first, a literature review for better understanding how international agricultural trade has been regulated since the end of the Second World War to the present, and second, a research effort to know the possible implications that said regulation have had for the evolution of European agricultural foreign trade. In this latter case, the issue is addressed through an empirical analysis using two of the main specialized statistical databases in international trade: EUROSTAT and COMTRADE. The results of the research show that, as the changes introduced by the CAP reforms have been consolidated (based on the trade commitments assumed by the EU), there has been a gradual decrease in the share of European exports in the international markets for continental products.

This study assesses the interaction between climate change and agricultural trade policies. We distinguish between two dimensions of agricultural trade policy: market insulation and subsidy levels. Building on the previous work of Tsigas, Frisvold and Kuhn (1997) we find that, in the presence of current levels of agricultural subsidies, increased price transmission --as called for under the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture-- reduces global welfare in the wake of climate change. This is due to the positive correlation between productivity changes and current levels of agricultural support. Increases in subsidized output under climate change tend to exacerbate inefficiencies in the global agricultural economy in the absence of market insulation. However, once agricultural subsidies have also been eliminated, price transmission via the global trading system contributes positively to economic adaptation under climate change. products. This may partially explain the relatively slow growth of world grain import demand in recent years. In addition, bilateral agreements with East Asia, NAFTA, and the evolution of the CAP, have all had important impacts on the structure of world food and agricultural trade. The objective of this paper is to assess the relative role of each of the major forces-- consumer demand, factor accumulation, transport costs, and policy change--in driving changes in the composition of world food trade in 1980-1995. To do so, we employ a modified version of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model of world trade which permits us to isolate the contribution of each of these related factors to the changing composition of world food trade in a general equilibrium context. We evaluate the relative role of each of these factors by simulating the model backwards in time, from 1995 to 1980 under different assumptions. This general approach, termed “backcasting” (i.e. backwards forecasting), takes as exogenous the basic drivers of change and attempts to explain the resulting change in food trade composition. The model-produced changes in the composition of agricultural and food trade are compared with historical trade data, to determine the relative importance of each factor on the changing composition of food trade. Given limited space, our focus will be on explaining the changes in the global composition of food and agriculture trade. A natural follow-on effort would target specific markets in more detail. This type of backcasting approach was first employed by Gehlhar (1997) who sought to explain the shift in exports of primary commodities to manufactures in East Asia in the 1980's. He calibrated the GTAP model to 1992 data, then implemented shocks to factor endowments and economywide total factor productivity (TFP) in order to force each economy back to its 1982 levels of population, land, labor, human capital, physical capital and technology. By comparing actual and predicted changes in export shares in this period, he found human capital accumulation played a key role in explaining the change in the aggregate composition of East Asian exports. Gehlhar, Hertel and Martin (1994) built on this work in an effort to predict future changes in the pattern of agricultural trade from 1992-2002. They also emphasized the importance of supply-side determinants of agricultural trade. In this paper, we go beyond this earlier work in a number of ways. First, we focus on the composition of agricultural exports, rather than simply looking at the share of agriculture in total trade. Secondly, we incorporate the Cranfield et al. estimates of Rimmer and Powell’s recently developed, implicitly directly additive demand system (nicknamed AIDADS) into the GTAP model. This permits us to better capture the impact of demand-side changes on the pattern of global tr

After many years and many rounds of negotiations seeking bilateral free trade agreements (FTA) between Australia and China, Japan and Korea, progress has been minimal because they cannot agree on access to markets for agricultural products. To add to the complications and lack of progress made in these negotiations, China, Japan and Korea have started negotiating a trilateral FTA. If a China-Japan-Korea Trilateral FTA is struck, it could affect Australian negotiation of bilateral FTAs with each of these countries, with consequential implications for Australian agricultural exports.These concerns are the main focus of this paper. However when the comparative advantages of agricultural production and agricultural trade complementarities of these countries are examined, it seems that if a China-Japan-Korea trilateral FTA is struck, it ought to not further complicate Australia's bilateral FTA negotiations. A trilateral FTA between China, Japan and Korea would have limited negative impacts on Australia's agricultural exports to these countries. Successfully concluding bilateral FTAs with each of China, Japan and Korea remains a formidable challenge because agreement on agricultural trade negotiations remains elusive. In future, Australia's FTA negotiators may need to be even more pragmatic, strategic and flexible in their approach to agricultural trade negotiations.

The important year of 1995 marked Vietnam’s first integration as a member of ASEAN. By 2016, Vietnam had negotiated, signed, and implemented sixteen free trade agreements. They include both multilateral and bilateral free trade agreements such as the China-ASEAN, Vietnam-Chile, and Vietnam-Japan agreements. By signing free trade agreements Vietnam can increase trade flows in bilateral and multilateral developed-country FTA scenarios. Trade creation and diversion can be found in multilateral developing-country FTA scenarios and the author finds the impacts of each free trade agreement is different if analyzed for each 2-digit commodity.
 Keywords
 Free trade agreement, trade, import, export.t commodity
 References
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Trade facilitation is essential to lowering overall trade costs and increasing economic returns on both the multilateral and regional levels. Trade facilitation is also an integral part of trade agreements and has become an important component of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This paper adopts a time-varying stochastic frontier gravity model and a trade inefficiency model and assigns values to different trade facilitation provisions to construct relevant indicators to assess the impacts of the trade facilitation provisions of the World Trade Organization Trade Facilitation Agreement (WTO TFA) and regional trade agreements (RTAs) on trade efficiency between China and BRI countries, as well as on the current conditions and challenges of fresh agricultural product trade between China and countries of the BRI, using data from 2011 to 2020. The results show that the size of domestic markets and population positively affect agricultural trade between China and BRI countries, while geographical distance has a negative impact on their scale of trade. Moreover, this study finds that the obligations set out in trade facilitation provisions of RTAs play an important role in improving trade efficiency, and among these trade facilitation obligations improving the legal provisions of “information transparency”, “customs cooperation” and “advance ruling” can significantly improve trade efficiency, however, some measures relating to “formalities” could potentially constitute barriers to trade. This study innovatively carried out an analysis of the impact of trade facilitation provisions on agricultural trade flows and efficiency from the perspectives of international trade law and economics and provides new policy recommendations for BRI countries to support agricultural trade.

Agricultural market distortions remain a major focus of contention in world trade negotiations. Estimates of the effects of liberalising current agricultural trade restrictions indicate an approximately $385 billion increase in global welfare, with the disproportionate share of the benefit being enjoyed by developing countries. In response to difficulties in adopting agricultural trade reforms, individual groups of countries have formed multiple bilateral and regional preferential trade agreements (PTA) to enhance trade among members. Few sectoral analyses exist of the effects on agricultural and food product trade of PTAs. This research uses a gravity model to isolate the effects of various PTAs on both intra‐ and extra‐bloc agricultural and food product trade for three time periods: 1995, 2000 and 2004. Findings strongly support PTA benefits in terms of increased intra‐bloc trade in both sectors. The findings also generally support trade creation in agricultural products. PTA membership was also associated with food trade creation in most cases, although diversion was observed for several associations composed primarily of developing countries.

Since 2002, despite persistent lobbying efforts from Taiwan to promote a U.S.-Taiwan Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the U.S. government remains insistent that Taiwan should focus on liberalizing its economy under the “Trade and Investment Framework Agreement” (TIFA). From the U.S. perspective, TIFA offers a “building block” for a future U.S.-Taiwan FTA. Under TIFA, the United States suggests that the two sides complete negotiations on a bilateral government procurement agreement, a bilateral investment agreement, and an agreement to avoid double taxation, so as to pave the way for the FTA. From the Taiwanese perspective, TIFA is merely a consolation prize for not having a U.S.-Taiwan FTA, even though Taiwanese officials have generally agreed to pursue this building block approach under TIFA. Moreover, since 2002, because of an acceleration of regional integration in East Asia in the form of signing bilateral FTAs, there has been serious “competitive liberalization” pressure on Taiwan to negotiate FTAs with its major trade partners. Not only would a U.S.-Taiwan FTA benefit the industries of both, but it would also provide a positive example to those who might fear retaliation from China, encouraging them to follow suit.1 Therefore, “lobbying beyond TIFA” so as to put a “U.S.-Taiwan FTA” on the U.S. trade negotiation agenda has always been a most important foreign policy objective for Taiwan.

INTRODUCTION Despite the progress in tariff reductions initiated by the World Trade Organization (WTO) over the past twenty years, there still exist a number of trade barriers and other problems needed to be addressed. Besides, there are conflicts among WTO country members in several issues. All these delay the trade liberalization process, which will take a long time for trade to be fully liberalized. As a result, several countries have moved ahead of the WTO by initiating regional and/or bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs). By end May 2004, more than 200 agreements have been enforced; 80 per cent of these numbers are bilateral agreements. Recently, ASEAN members have been very active in forming bilateral FTAs with non-ASEAN members. For example, Singapore enacted the Japan-Singapore FTA in 2002 and the U.S.-Singapore FTA in 2003; and Singapore has been negotiating with several countries such as Canada, Mexico, and South Korea. Thailand also signed the free trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand in 2004 and 2005, respectively; and it has been initiating FTAs with several countries. Many concerns have been raised whether it is the most beneficial to each ASEAN member to sign the agreements separately, rather than collectively. Even though a bilateral agreement may broaden market access, reduce trade barriers, increase investment opportunity and strengthen other cooperation between the two countries, it appears that a small country often loses bargaining power over a big country in arranging the agreement. ASEAN, as a group, would have more bargaining powers in negotiating with big FTA partners such as the United States, China, and Japan. Moreover, bilateral FTAs that ASEAN members have engaged in may lead to welfare losses while trade liberalization among ASEAN has yet fully be honoured. These losses are partly caused by in-efficient resource utilization and possible negative terms-of-trade effects, arising from the FTAs.

Agricultural trade and virtual land use: The case of China's crop trade