Center for Agricultural Trade

Permanent URI for this collection

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

Browse

Browsing Center for Agricultural Trade by Author "Sydow, Sharon"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Has Covid19 Caused a Great Trade Collapse? An Initial Ex Post Assessment
    Arita, Shawn; Grant, Jason H.; Sydow, Sharon (Virginia Tech. Center for Agricultural Trade, 2020-11)
    This paper conducts an early econometric examination of the impacts of COVID-19 on international trade. We find the pandemic reduced global agricultural trade by 4.2% in the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2020. Agricultural trade was found to be significantly more stable than nonagricultural trade; however, the level of disruption varies substantially across commodities.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Has global agricultural trade been resilient under coronavirus (COVID-19)? Findings from an econometric assessment of 2020
    Arita, Shawn; Grant, Jason H.; Sydow, Sharon; Beckman, Jayson (Elsevier, 2022-02)
    Global agricultural trade, which increased at the end of 2020, has been described as "resilient" to the impacts of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic; however, the size and channels of its quantitative impacts are not clear. Using a reduced-form, gravity-based econometric model for monthly trade, we estimate the effects of COVID-19 incidence rates, policy restrictions imposed by governments to curb the outbreak, and the de facto reduction in human mobility/lockdown effect on global agricultural trade through the end of 2020. We find that while agricultural trade remained quite stable through the pandemic, the sector as a whole did not go unscathed. First, we estimate that COVID-19 reduced agricultural trade by the approximate range of 5 to 10 percent at the aggregate sector level; a quantified impact two to three times smaller in magnitude than our estimated impact on trade occurring in the non-agricultural sector. Second, we find sharp differences across individual commodities. In particular, we find that non-food items (hides and skins, ethanol, cotton, and other commodities), meat products including seafood, and higher value agri-food products were most severely impacted by the pandemic; however, the COVID-19 trade effect for the majority of food and bulk agricultural commodity sectors were found to be insignificant, or in a few cases, positive. Finally, we also examine the effects across low vs high income countries, the changing dynamics of the pandemic's effect on trade flows, and the effects along the extensive product margins of trade.