Supply chain disruptions and containerized agricultural exports from California ports

Abstract

We study the trade effects of the 2021 supply chain disruptions on containerized agricultural exports from California ports. Our event studies show that port congestion and container shortages reduced agricultural exports by 22% from May to November 2021. The export losses exceed $3.2 billion and vary substantially across commodity groups, with California tree nut producers facing the brunt of the financial repercussions. California agriculture's losses surpass those from the 2018 China-US trade war by far. The export disruptions mirror the fact that California ports are among the least efficient globally.

The impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on grain and oilseed trade

“…The regression framework captures pretrends and enables us to assess posttreatment dynamics (Freyaldenhoven et al, 2021;Roth & Sant'Anna, 2021;Schmidheiny & Siegloch, 2020). Following Carter et al (2022), we rely on a nonlinear panel regression model for count data:…”

“…The regression framework captures pretrends and enables us to assess posttreatment dynamics (Freyaldenhoven et al, 2021; Roth & Sant'Anna, 2021; Schmidheiny & Siegloch, 2020). Following Carter et al (2022), we rely on a nonlinear panel regression model for count data: $$${y}_{{ijst}}=\text{exp}\left({\alpha }_{{ijs},{mo}}+{\alpha }_{{ijs},{yr}}+\sum _{k=-5}^{k=5}{\beta }_{k}{r}_{{ijs},t-k}\right){\eta }_{{ijst}},$$$where we denote the importer with $$i$$, the exporter with $$j$$, the commodity with $$s$$, and the month with $$t$$. The outcome of interest is denoted by $${y}_{{ijst}}$$ and maps into import quantities and prices.…”

“…We use trade data from 2015 to 2019 as the control group to measure the causal treatment effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and quantify the trade destruction and diversion effects. Carter et al (2022) used a similar identification strategy to evaluate the impact of the 2021/22 container shipping disruptions on US agricultural exports. We rely on the Poisson Pseudo Maximum likelihood estimator to identify the relationship between the count outcome and the treatment variables and account for the high‐dimensional fixed effects using a modified version of the iteratively re‐weighted least‐squares algorithm (Correia et al, 2020; Silva & Tenreyro, 2006).…”

The impact of maritime shipping disruptions on US tree nut exports and inventories

“…Maritime trade experienced considerable growth during the last two decades, benefiting from lower capital costs, which facilitated the significant expansion of US exports of perishable products (Beghin & Schweizer, 2021). Although global trade saw a considerable collapse in early 2020 due to the Covid‐19 pandemic (Arita et al, 2022; Laborde et al, 2020), US imports recovered quickly, particularly on the route between Asia and the United States (Carter et al, 2022). Higher demand for durable goods in the United States drove much of that recovery.…”

“…This paper assesses the impact of the 2021/22 maritime shipping disruptions on US tree nut exports and evaluates the implications for domestic tree nut inventories. To quantify the trade effects of maritime shipping disruptions, we rely on a nonlinear panel regression model with dynamic treatment effects following the approach developed by Carter et al (2022) and Steinbach (2022). We sourced monthly port‐level export data for almonds, pistachios, and walnuts from the US Census Bureau (2022) and estimated the treatment dynamics between May 2021 and July 2022.…”