Center for Agricultural Trade

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https://hdl.handle.net/10919/85060

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Browsing Center for Agricultural Trade by Author "Peterson, Everett B."

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Evaluating the Trade Impacts of Bovine Spongiform Ecephalopathy (BSE) Using Historical Simulations
    Peterson, Everett B.; Grant, Jason H.; Sydow, Sharon (Virginia Tech, 2017-10)
    In December of 2003, the US Secretary of Agriculture announced the presence of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) within a cow in the state of Washington. The announcement prompted the stoppage of beef imports by some of the US’s largest traditional beef trading partners, resulting in sizeable losses to industry. While this was the first confirmed case of BSE reported in the United States, the international policy response was significant in nearly every major U.S. beef export market. NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada opened their markets to U.S. beef rather quickly following the announcement. However, other markets, including many of the top US export destinations such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China, remained closed for much longer periods and China’s market remained closed until September 2016. In this paper, a partial equilibrium model of global meat production and trade is developed to conduct a series of historical simulations over the period 2001 to 2013 to capture the observed impacts of the BSE outbreak on global meat trade. Then a set of counter-factual experiments are constructed that adjusts the changes in preferences and technical change in the historical simulation to determine what beef meat trade would have looked like if the BSE outbreak had not occurred. Over the 2004-2013 period, total US beef exports would have been approximately 2 million metric tons higher and the total value of beef exports would have been $6.1 billion higher if the BSE outbreak had not occurred. Canadian beef exports would also have been 350,000 metric tons higher and with the total value of exports increasing by $1.7 billion if the BSE outbreak had not occurred. Conversely, the value of beef exports from Australia, New Zealand, the EU, and South America would have be substantially lower.
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    Hidden Trade Costs? Maximum Residue Limits and U.S. Exports of Fresh Fruits and Vegetables
    Hejazi, Mina; Grant, Jason H.; Peterson, Everett B. (Center for Agricultural Trade, 2018-07)
    Consecutive rounds of trade negotiations at the multilateral and regional level have resulted in significant reductions to agricultural tariffs. However, agricultural economists and policy makers alike agree that non-tariff measures (NTMs) are more obscure in nature and have the potential to be more trade distorting. Among the list of NTMs, Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures play an influential role in agri-food product trade. In this article we focus on a specific type of SPS measure known as maximum residue limits (MRLs) that features prominently in multilateral and regional trade negotiations. The purpose of this research project is threefold. First, we construct a comprehensive database of country-and-product specific MRLs for global fresh fruit and vegetable trade that varies by pesticide chemical type: herbicides, insecticides and fungicides. Second, we develop a new index summarizing the extent of bilateral MRL stringency between importing and exporting countries on pesticide tolerances focusing specific attention on the U.S. and its bilateral trading partners. Third, formal econometric models are developed to quantify and test the degree to which more stringent MRL standards in importing countries as compared to comparable domestic standards that exist in exporting countries restrict fresh fruit and vegetable trade. The results suggest importer MRL standards that are stricter than exporter MRLs can impart significant reductions in bilateral fresh fruit and vegetable trade.
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    Trade Elasticities and Trade Disputes: New Evidence from Tariffs and Relative Preference Margins
    Grant, Jason H.; Ning, Xin; Peterson, Everett B. (Center for Agricultural Trade, 2018-08)
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    Trade impact of maximum residue limits in fresh fruits and vegetables
    Hejazi, Mina; Grant, Jason H.; Peterson, Everett B. (Elsevier, 2022-01)
    Interfering maximum residue limits (MRLs) for pesticides with agricultural trade is becoming important for food and trade policies in the early 21st century. Differing levels for pesticide residues among countries have the potential to disrupt trade significantly. We employ a non-linear and disaggregated stringency index to quantify the degree of regulatory heterogeneity levels for pesticides between trading nations for fruits and vegetables in 2013 and 2014 and investigate the trade-restricting nature of this measure using the structural gravity framework. Our findings indicate that stricter importer MRLs reduce bilateral trade to the tune of 8.8%. Looking closer at MRLs with US partners, the effect of stricter MRLs is quite elastic concerning its impact on the US -EU trade. In particular, the estimates imply that a more stringent MRL's policy decreases the US export of fruits and vegetables to the EU members by a striking 13.8%. At the disaggregated level of MRL indices over different classes of chemicals, the results indicate that there is a significant gap in regulations regarding MRLs among several major US foreign markets for fruits and vegetables, particularly in the EU and the Trans-Pacific trading partners.