Browsing by Author "Xie, Chaoping"

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    Agricultural exports and retaliatory trade actions: An empirical assessment of the 2018/2019 trade conflict
    Grant, Jason H.; Arita, Shawn; Emlinger, Charlotte; Johansson, Robert C.; Xie, Chaoping (2021-01)
    We estimate the ex-post agricultural trade impacts of retaliatory measures imposed by foreign countries in response to United States' Section 232 and 301 tariffs using a theoretically consistent, monthly, product line gravity equation. Retaliation led to significant US agricultural export losses of $13.5 to $18.7 billion on an annualized basis. Considerable heterogeneity exists in the average treatment effect of retaliation. First, retaliatory trade actions presented a strong within-year seasonal impact. Nearly 70% of aggregate trade losses occurred during the US's peak export marketing season. Second, U.S. trade losses were particularly pronounced on homogeneous bulk commodities, whereas product differentiation dampened the impact of retaliation. Third, with few exceptions, the counterfactually estimated direct trade losses line up well with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) trade damage estimates for trade aid programs distributed to farmers impacted by the trade dispute. Finally, we find little evidence that U.S. exports were able to be reoriented to alternative, nonretaliating markets-an indication of high bilateral trade frictions and the destructive consequences of retaliatory trade actions.
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    The Role of State Owned and Private Enterprises in China’s Agricultural Imports
    Grant, Jason H.; Xie, Chaoping (Center for Agricultural Trade, 2018-05)
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    Towards a More Efficient Tariff Rate Quota Regime: Evidence from Chinese Firm-Level Grain Imports
    Xie, Chaoping (Virginia Tech, 2019-01-18)
    Pioneered by Bernard et al. (1995) and Melitz (2003), recent advances in the international economics literature emphasizing the role of firm-level productivity differences has shed new light on the dynamics of international trade. Despite gaining significant traction in the international economics literature, firm-level analysis in the agricultural economics literature is comparatively rare, particularly in an emerging, industrialized economy such as China. This dissertation consists of three essays that provide firm-level analysis on Chinese agricultural trade since China's accession to the world trade organization (WTO). In the first essay, I segment by ownership structure to examine the role of different firm types in Chinese agricultural trade and find that domestic, private firms dominate Chinese agricultural trade and contribute 60%, or $96 billion, of the agricultural trade growth over the 2000-2016 period. Furthermore, the results show that although the economic weight of the state sector is declining, the share of state-owned enterprises (SOE) in strategically important commodities, such as wheat, corn, and rice imports are consistently high. In the second essay, I develop an empirical strategy to break down China's agricultural import trade growth. The findings reveal that China's agricultural import growth is highly concentrated among a small group of firms, where the top 10% of Chinese agricultural importers account for nearly 90% of the country's agricultural imports. I also find evidence of significant agri-food product importer turnover as over 40% of new firms entering China's agricultural import market exited after just 1.7 years during our sample period. In the last essay, I evaluate the efficiency of a specific Chinese non-tariff measure (NTM), the tariff rate quota (TRQ), using Chinese firm-level data. Two key findings emerge from this analysis. First, unlike results from country-level analyses, I find that SOEs import quantities are more sensitive to price changes. Additionally, more SOEs import grains when the price differential between domestic and world markets increases. Second, I fail to find any causal difference in the SOE share of TRQ imports before and after the two previously mentioned policy events were implemented to promote the market orientation of Chinese grain imports