Food Safety Standards and International Trade: The Impact on Developing Countries’ Export Performance

Abstract

The expansion of food safety standards in regulations has introduced new complexity in trade policy dialogues and efforts to expand trade in agricultural products. A loss of competitiveness due to the costs required to comply with these standards has arisen concern among exporting firms, particularly those in developing countries. This chapter reviews and synthesizes existing studies that quantify the impact of food safety standards with particular attention to developing countries' access to international markets. Based on the empirical studies using country-level data such as those using the gravity models, food safety standards have an adverse effect on trade in general. Furthermore, this adverse trade effect is likely to be greater for developing countries than developed countries. The firm-level studies generally demonstrate the adverse effect of food safety standards to impose direct/indirect and one-time/recurring costs on exporting firms in developing countries. In contrast, some of the country-and firm-level studies suggest the presence of the demand-enhancing effect of standards. However, the net effect of tightened food safety standards on developing countries appears to be generally negative according to the studies to assess the demand and supply impact of food safety standards because the tradecost effect tends to outweigh the demand-enhancing effect. Given this extensive literature review, this chapter highlights the importance of a concerted effort

Estimating the Impact of Technical Barriers to Trade in WTO Regime: The Case of Pakistan

“…Partners (as well as Pakistan) should attain valuable and useful lessons to advance their technical standards by initiating the measure(s), and processing them before exporting the merchandise to the demanding economies. This result further supports the idea of Devadason and Govindaraju (2016), Keiichiro, et al (2015), Kapuya (2015), Otsuki, et al (2000), Moenius (2004), Da Silva-Glasgow, and Hosein (2018), among others. Similarly, high and lower middle income countries show similar patterns of coefficients, but the remaining two groups, i.e., upper and lower income countries, show opposite signs.…”

“…In spite of all this, the developing countries are affected the worse because of compliance hitches. Several other studies found a negative relation between import and TBT under WTO regime including Devadason and Govindaraju (2016), Keiichiro, et al, 2015), Da Silva-Glasgow andHosein (2018), andSanjuan, et al (2017). TBT has trade distorting impacts, found by Kapuya (2015), Otsuki, et al (2000), and Moenius (2004).…”

The Impact of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures and Technical Barriers to Trade on Imports of China with Partner Countries

“…This proves that although TBT improves the products quality but it also restricts import of commodities. Similar results supports the ideas of Otsuki et al (2000), Kapuya (2015), Keiichiro et al (2015), Devadason and Govindaraju (2016), Da Silva-Glasgow andHosein (2018), andMoenius (2004).…”

How do food safety regulations influence market price? A theoretical analysis

“…The question associated with food safety is largely dominated by the concern linked to food security in terms of quantitative acceptance (Henson and Jaffee, 2007;Henson and Blandon, 2007). Consequently, food production in many DCs often has limited standardisation and minimal imposition of food safety requirements, except in export sectors where constraints are set by importing countries (Keiichiro et al, 2015)[5]. However, consumers in DCs are increasingly exposed to high levels of various risks with the food they consume such as pesticides (WHO, 2004) or food poisoning (toxins and E-coli) [6].…”

“…Food safety regulations 5. Not that the majority of available works addressing food safety issues in DCs adopt an international trade perspective (Keiichiro et al, 2015). Economists do not neglect the consumer health issue, but the predominance of strategic development plans based on exports have, to a certain extent, oriented the economic literature in this direction, by relaying the DCs' donors' and public authorities' concerns (Unnevehr, 2015).…”