Protection Level And Structure Of Our Agricultural Impon Trade Policy

For a long time, our import trade policy of agriculture has played a crucial role in protecting the development of our agricultural trade and strengthening the foundational position of agriculture economy. However, since 2001 we entering into the WTO, and according to the requirement of the WTO and our commitments, we need to constantly lower the agricultural tariff rate, cut down the agricultural non-tariff barriers and reduce the domestic support measures which belong to the "Amber Box Policy". This means that, on the one hand the openness of our agricultural market will be improve and the other countries will expand their penetration into China, so the impact to our agricultural market will be strengthened, and on the other hand the adjustment of the agricultural import trade policy that we used to protect agricultural economy and deal with the impact will be more narrowed. Thus, under the situation of external shocks and internal difficulties how to promote the protection level of our agricultural trade effectively and protect the development of our agricultural trade better will have an important theoretical and practical significance.Choosing our agricultural products market access policy and domestic support policy as the research object and reviewing and summarizing the existing literature at home and abroad, this paper extends the small country model of Anderson-Neary’s Trade Restrictiveness Index to the large open country model, and constructs the Trade Restrictiveness Index model to measure the agricultural market access policy and domestic support policy. According to the model we measure the protection level, protection structure and welfare effects of our agricultural market access policy and domestic support policy from 2001 to 2011. Meanwhile, this paper makes empirical tests on the influencing factors of our policy protection level and structure, accordingly offers the policy recommendations for our policy adjustment.Our agricultural market access policy in this paper includes the tariff policy, quota policy, automatically import licensing administration system, import licensing administration system and prohibiting import administration system. We measure the market access policy of 221 kinds of agricultural and find that comparing with the protection in 2001, after China’s access to the WTO, the protection level of our agricultural products market access policy lowers significantly. While after the sub-prime crisis in 2007, the protection level goes up obviously. And later post financial crisis era in 2011, we relaxed the protection of agricultural, and the protection level declines distinctly. Meanwhile from the protection structure point of view, at present the adjustment of the protection level of NTB-constrained products, intermediate products, labor-intensive products, consumer-oriented products, animal by-products and other products will be more effective to the adjustment of the protection level of our agricultural products market access policy. While the basic economy factors that influencing the protection level and structure are the agricultural added value, tariff rate, competition index and exchange rate. Besides, the study of welfare effects finds that the marginal cost of our agricultural tariff is negative, while the shadow price of NTB policy is positive, which suggest that the market access policy reform of lowering the tariff rate and increasing the quota will promote the social welfare level.The study of our agricultural domestic support policy starts with the difference between the consumer price and the producer price which caused by the domestic support policy and chooses 17 representative products as the sample to test the protection level, structure and welfare effects. It finds that comparing with the protection in 2001, the protection level of our agricultural domestic support policy rises obviously from 2001 to 2011 and especially since the sub-prime crisis in 2007, the protection level has increased faster. At the same time, the study of protection’s policy structure means that in recent years the protection level of producer goes up fastest and the protection level of the input makes most contributions to the whole level of domestic support policy. While the study of protection’s product structure finds that the protection level of animal by-products not only increased fastest, but also contributes most to the whole level. As well as the fluctuation of the protection level and structure of our domestic support policy is caused by the change of agricultural output, production cost, consumer price, input price and competition index. In addition, the welfare effects of policy reform are performed by the marginal welfare effects of consumer price, producer price and input price. And the marginal welfare effects of consumer and producer price are negative, which means that the policy reform of increasing the consumer and producer price will lower the welfare level. While the marginal welfare effects of input price are positive. That is to say, the policy reform of increasing the input price will promote the welfare level.