Empirical Study On Impacts Of Technical Barrier To Trade On China's Agricultural Export

Technical Barrier to Trade has given great impacts on China's agricultural exports, especially on traditional labor-intensive products. How to evaluate these impacts becomes people's focus. The author tries to summarize methods of quantifying Technical Barrier to Trade and put inventory-based approaches, survey-based approaches and gravity model into practice. The research results show that the stringent foreign technical standard is one of the obstacles to China's agricultural exports. A 10 percent lower maximum residue level (MRL) of contamination will reduce trade flow by 1.36 percent for tea, 3.6 percent for vegetables, and 4.1 percent for seafood. Another obstacle is China's food unsafety problem. For the food quality standard system of China and foreign country, the closer they are to each other, the less constrains will China's agricultural exports face. At the end of the paper, the author gives some proper suggestions based on the analysis.