Food Label Regulations in the United States and European Community:

Growing interdependence among the world's food markets presents increased trade and investment opportunities for food firms. Although international trade agreements have recently been negotiated which will likely lead to increased food trade, especially among Western nations, revised product standards and technical regulations used in the course of implementing these agreements have potential to create trade barriers that are less obvious. This paper assesses recent developments in food quality and labeling regulations in the European Community (EC) and United States. The regulatory changes taking place in these large trading partners have the potential to result in trade barriers based on meeting technical standards, especially since the reforms are being pursued independently in each country.     

Agricultural price distortions: trends and volatility,past, and prospective

Historically, earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a pro‐urban bias in own‐country policies, as well as by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies reduced global economic welfare and agricultural trade, and added to global inequality and poverty. Over the past three decades, much progress has been made in reducing agricultural protection in high‐income countries and agricultural disincentives in developing countries. However, plenty of price distortions remain. As well, the propensity of governments to insulate their domestic food market from fluctuations in international prices has not waned. Such insulation contributes to the amplification of international food price fluctuations, yet it does little to advance national food security when food‐importing and food‐exporting countries equally engage in insulating behavior. Thus there is still much scope to improve global economic welfare via multilateral agreement not only to remove remaining trade distortions but also to desist from varying trade barriers when international food prices gyrate. This article summarizes indicators of trends and fluctuations in farm trade barriers before examining unilateral or multilateral trade arrangements, together with complementary domestic measures, that could lead to better global food security outcomes.     

Consumers’ preferences for fresh broccolis: interactive effects between country of origin and organic labels

While international trade in organic products has grown significantly, understanding consumers’ preferences for imported organic foods has remained limited. This research examines the impact of country‐of‐origin labeling on US consumers’ choices of organic foods. Results show that consumer valuation of domestically produced organic broccoli was significantly higher than that of imported organic broccoli. Adding information about USDA organic certification standards/rules for imported products mildly increases consumer valuation of imported organic broccoli in some cases. These findings suggest that providing such information may have a positive impact on consumer willingness to purchase imported organic products.     

Harmonization of food trade standards and regulations in ASEAN: the case of Malaysia's food imports

Regulatory heterogeneity continues to be identified as a challenge for food trade in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as the progress of harmonization of food standards among member states remains slow. Using a new and comprehensive database on nontariff measures (NTMs), this article examines the coverage, frequency, and diversity of NTMs for the food sector in Malaysia, and then estimates their impact on food imports from ASEAN. The food sector in Malaysia is found to be highly regulated, dominated by technical measures, namely, labeling for sanitary and phytosanitary and technical barriers to trade reasons, product quality, and restricted substances. The empirical results subsequently verify that, overall, technical measures are import restrictive. This article therefore contends that harmonization of food standards and regulations at the regional level is important for enhancing trade. However, building common ground for food safety regulations should be NTM‐ and sector‐specific, to realize progress in terms of regulatory convergence. This is particularly true for the food sector, since complete harmonization is not practical and not politically feasible.     

Economics and politics of food standards,trade, and development#

Standards have played an important role in food trade for a very long time. Their rapid growth in recent years has triggered vigorous debates on their impacts on international trade and development, with many arguing that standards are “non‐tariff barriers” to trade and that standards are marginalizing the poor. I present conceptual frameworks and review empirical evidence on the equity and efficiency effects and the political economy of standards. Models which incorporate essential aspects of standards yield complex theoretical results and nuanced conclusions. Careful empirical analyses support such nuanced arguments and find complex effects. For trade, standards can create welfare gains but also involve rent redistribution which induces lobbying by interest groups to set the standards at their preferred level. This makes it difficult to distinguish socially desirable standards from those resulting from political rent‐seeking. For development, it is crucial to explicitly account for (a) the endogeneity of the institutional organization of value chains and (b) both smallholder contracting and employment creation on large scale farms when considering the impact of standards on development and poverty.     

Measuring the relative importance of preferences for country of origin in China, France, Niger, and the United States

Recent labeling policies in developed countries place new focus on origin labeling, especially country of origin labeling, for a variety of food products. It is not clear if this new emphasis on origin is the result of more ethnocentric consumer preferences for food. We measure consumer preferences for country of origin in four different international locations and one domestic control location using a conjoint experiment to test the null hypotheses that consumers do not have stronger own-country preferences. In addition, we compare the relative importance of consumer preferences for origin to their preferences for genetically modified food and pesticide-free production using attribute coefficients from within location ordered probit models. The study was conducted in China, France, Niger, and the United States. We find consumers tend to prefer food from their own location indicating ethnocentric tendencies do play a role in shaping country-of-origin preferences. Country of origin is generally less important to consumers than genetically modified food content and pesticide use in food production.     

中国出口人造板产品质量及其影响因素研究

基于1998—2017年中国人造板产品贸易相关数据,运用并修正HallakSchott模型,测算中国出口人造板产品质量。建立回归模型,实证分析中国出口人造板产品质量的影响因素。结果表明:中国出口人造板产品质量稳步上升,但质量水平仍然较低,且增速较慢,存在较大的上升空间;人均工资对中国出口人造板产品质量具有显著的正向影响;出口贸易壁垒和进口贸易壁垒对中国出口人造板产品质量具有显著的负向影响。最后,提出规范人造板产品出口市场,适当提高进入门槛和产品质量标准;合理配置核心竞争要素,推动行业升级的建议。     

中美贸易战对林产品贸易的影响及其对策建议

在梳理中美林产品贸易相互关系的基础上,分析了新一轮贸易战将对中美林业产业、林产品贸易、就业等的影响。结果表明:贸易战对中低级技术水平的从业人员影响较大,短期内对中国传统优势产品出口冲击较大,但长期反而能分摊和降低贸易风险,以价格优势为主的微利型木材加工企业和以美国为主要出口市场的出口导向型企业将面临较大风险;同时,贸易战不仅会直接损害美国消费者利益,还会加速其木材产业的萎缩。拓宽进口渠道,扩展替代市场和国内市场,加快国际合作,加强技术创新,落实财政政策是中国减缓和避免贸易战对中美双方林产品贸易产生不利影响的应对措施。     

FUTURE AUSTRALIA-JAPAN TRADE RELATIONS

The leitmotif of this paper is the strong, rising and alarming trend of deficits in Australia's balance of payments current account, which makes it overwhelmingly important to increase exports. Market promotion, substantially the existing method, will not do the job in a world with politically set up trade barriers. Multilateral political negotiations about the removal of the trade barriers within the G.A.T.T. system are unlikely to help for Australia's range of exports. Therefore Australia must enter into bilateral negotiations with any likely important customer, the most obvious one being Japan, to lower trade barriers on a bilateral basis, and this under the existing international agreements can be done only under the guise of a partial free trade area.     

基于绿色消费心理木制品供应链追溯卡的设计

为了满足欧美消费者绿色消费心理需求,应用M1S70卡作为木制品供应链追溯卡,实现了对木制品供应链日志的全程记录。设计了三级权限的安全机制:企业权限可以阅读上游日志并写入生产日志;政府权限可以在监管时永久锁定上游日志;而消费者权限可透明阅读全程日志。安全机制能阻绝盗砍滥伐的非法木材进入加工环节,提高国产木制品的国际竞争力,帮助消费者了解木制品原料来源和工艺流程。     

Market Performance of International Agriculture as Modified by Government Subsidies and Trade Barriers

Many developed countries have reduced agricultural market performance in the last decade with increased domestic subsidies and trade barriers. Several data sets were used to illustrate the extent of market distortion among some markets. Economic theory can show that these distortions reduce the general welfare in the countries with high trade barriers as well as the traditional agricultural exporting countries. The dairy industries appear to have the highest Producer Subsidy Equivalent. Among the developed countries, Western European countries and the Pacific Rim countries have caused major distortions in international markets of many agricultural products. Market performance in agricultural industries would be substantially improved if these major distortions were eliminated.     

农业企业社会责任壁垒化及对策分析

随着经济全球化的发展和人们消费责任的提高,企业社会责任挂钩于国际贸易壁垒,已经成为各国贸易中备受关注的话题。中国是农业大国,加入WTO以后,农产品出口企业一直面临"企业社会责任"新型贸易壁垒的挑战与考验。文章回顾了企业社会责任壁垒化的十年历程,并运用经济学原理分析其原因,重点指出中国农业企业在承担社会责任方面存在的问题,最后提出加强农业企业社会责任建设、跨越农产品出口壁垒的对策。     

Modeling differentiated quality standards in the agri-food sector: the case of meat trade in the enlarged EU

Quality standards play an increasingly important role in international agri-food trade, and their functioning as nontariff barriers to trade is widely discussed. We argue that food quality standards imposed by importing countries are more than just border measures and can have profound effects on the market structure of the exporting industry, thereby significantly influencing the supply response. We develop a stylized oligopoly model that accounts for compliance costs (fixed and variable) and investigate alternative policy options to explore different mechanisms an importing county may use to enhance the quality of its imports. The model explicitly recognizes the coexistence of complying and noncomplying firms, which is a situation often found in low-income countries where a small modern export-oriented segment invests in meeting foreign quality standards. We use the adjustment of the Polish meat sector to the tight EU food quality standards as an empirical example. The simulations show that a subsidy scheme can promote compliance with standards and can contribute to an upgrade of the industry in the exporting country, but its marginal effectiveness is diminishing.     

中国木质林产品出口贸易中的环境问题及对策分析

近年来中国林产品贸易迅速发展,木质林产品出口贸易占中国林产品出口贸易较大比重。中国木质林产品出口贸易的发展存在资源的约束、国内生产环境损失严重以及遭受国际贸易壁垒等问题。应该从产品取材、产业发展的效率化和积极参与林产品贸易的国际经济合作等方面实现木质林产品出口贸易发展方式的转变,最终实现木质林产品出口贸易的可持续发展。     

The Heterogeneous Effects of Standards on Agricultural Trade Flows

This article uses a theory‐based translog gravity model to investigate the heterogeneous effects of food standards on aggregate agricultural trade. We revisit the ‘standards‐as‐barriers‐to‐trade’ debate with a distinctive twist. In contrast to existing works, we show that standards reduce trade but even more so for countries that trade smaller volumes. Our identification strategy exploits the within‐country variation in specific trade concerns. We confirm that stricter importer standards are indeed trade‐restrictive. However, the estimated trade cost elasticity varies depending on how intensively two countries trade. Specifically, it decreases in magnitude with an increasing import share of the exporter in the importing country's total imports. The reason is simple but intuitive; bigger trading partners find it more profitable to invest in meeting the costs of importer‐specific standards. This work is novel in showing that the standards–trade debate misses out on an important heterogeneity driven by existing import shares. Liberalising non‐tariff measures will favour smaller trading partners more than well‐established ones.     

LIBERALISING OECD AGRICULTURAL POLICIES IN THE URUGUAY ROUND: EFFECTS ON TRADE AND WELFARE

A dynamic, stochastic, multi-commodity model of world food markets is used to estimate the effects of liberalising agricultural policies in industrial countries. The effects on international and domestic prices, on trade volumes and on economic welfare of a phased liberalisation of industrial-country policies between 1988 and 1992 are compared with the effects of a similar hypothetical liberalisation in the early 1980s. The results suggest that, because of the dramatic increase in agricultural protection during the 1980s, the effects of a liberalisation under the Uruguay Round would be, in real terms, more than double those that would have resulted from a similar liberalisation a decade earlier. Major gainers are consumers in Western Europe and Japan and farmers in developing countries. But the cost to tax-payers in Western Europe is also escalating, not to mention the burden on non-agricultural producers in those countries whose competitiveness is reduced by farm policies. These domestic pressures from treasuries and from producers of non-farm products, together with greater international pressure for reform from agricultural-exporting countries, have raised the probability of at least some liberalisation during the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations.     

Sinks, Emissions Intensity Caps and Barriers to Emissions Trading

The European Union (EU) has raised concerns about the use of sinks and an Emissions Intensity system in Canada and has decided not to allow sinks to be included in its trading system. Despite this restriction, the EU has shown interest in expanding its trading system to include other countries such as Japan and Canada, while Canada hopes to use sinks and a domestic trading system with an Emissions Intensity regulatory mechanism to meet its Kyoto GHG commitments. In this paper, we briefly discuss some of the implications of the Emissions Intensity regulations scheme, and then develop a simple credit model with trade to illustrate the effect of a trade ban put in place by the EU, first, when it is fully binding and second, when there are countries that can act to arbitrage both markets (e.g., Japan). We also look at the possibilities of using harmonization frameworks to control trade, as well as using a form of discounting with respect to Canadian credits. We show that it is highly unlikely that a trade barrier will increase the use of emission reduction (and decreased use of sinks), and that, particularly in the likely case that Canada will import credits, trade barriers will actually increase the use of sinks. We do find, however, that the use of discounting could serve as a possible policy alternative to increase the use of EU reductions, while decreasing the quantity of Canadian sink credits.     

水产品国际贸易研究综述

全球范围内水产品供求总量与供求结构的不平衡导致世界水产品贸易的增长,这使得对水产品贸易问题研究成为学术界关注的焦点之一。本文从不同层次、不同视角对国内外学者的水产品国际贸易研究进行了评述,以期展示该领域的研究脉络和前沿。特别从水产品贸易增长及其因素分析、区域性水产品贸易问题、水产品国际竞争力和技术性贸易壁垒四个方面进行了分析。     

Legal,Ethical, or Responsible Food

The article discusses the concepts of legal, ethical, and responsible food in international food business. Food rules are divided into 3 categories: rules you follow because you have to (law), rules you follow because it is right (ethics), and rules you follow because it gives you a competitive advantage (responsibility). Food issues that need to be addressed include consumer rights (safety, nutrition, marketing), environmental issues (climate, eutrophication, biodiversity), employee policies, animal welfare, and fair trade practices. The laws of various countries often leave room for ethics and responsibility. This room varies between countries and elements of responsibility. In the European Union, United States, and China, market focus is on somewhat different food issues. Retailers and consumers drive food companies toward change, and the level of effort required is defined through combining food company values and stakeholder views.     

我国特色果蔬国际贸易中存在的技术壁垒问题探析

我国是农业大国,农产品的国际贸易对我国经济发展具有较大的影响。随着我国农产品贸易出口量的增加,国外许多国家,尤其是发达国家开始制定许多措施来限制我国农产品的出口,其中技术壁垒对我国农产品出口产生很大的阻碍。为了更好地促进农产品贸易发展,我国逐渐将特色果蔬作为农产品贸易的主要竞争力,特色果蔬不仅具有较高的经济效益,其区域特色、品质特色及丰富的营养结构等优势更是顺应了消费者对农产品质量要求越来越高的新变化。文章通过阐述特色农产品与技术壁垒等的相关概念,进而分析我国特色果蔬国际贸易发展存在的相关问题,从不利与有利因素来研究技术壁垒对我国特色果蔬国际贸易带来的影响,以此为我国特色果蔬贸易的发展提出以下几点政策建议:(1)提高特色果蔬产品质量安全水平;(2)完善特色果蔬质量标准体系建设;(3)实现特色果蔬集约化生产与运输。