An Analysis On The Situation And Factors Of China's Vegetable Trade

Accounting for 6.4% in 1998 and 11.6% in 2003, China has gradually taken the dominant position in world vegetable trade. On the other hand, more countries employ trade barriers to protect the domestic vegetable industries and China is also facing a series of problems such as scale of operation, the inferior vegetable products and packages. Obviously, Challenges and opportunities do exist simultaneously.In this context, this paper first gives a rough judgment upon the current world vegetable trade, which consists the background of the paper. Secondly, as the main body of the paper, systematical analyses are carried out on Chinese vegetable flows by both qualitative and quantitative methods. Moreover, a gravity model is applied to identify the main factors affecting Chinese vegetable exports. Finally, conclusions are drawn out: 1) it is obvious that China vegetable trade has been expanding continuously. Vegetable exports still play a preponderant role although the growth rate of vegetable exports is relatively lower than that of vegetable imports, which is based on the larger scale of vegetable exports in China; 2) Chinese vegetables have been exported to more countries due to the relative advantages although only a few of the vegetable species and products account for a large part of the Chinese vegetable market; 3) Chinese vegetable trade should be positively related to trade preferential policies and negatively related to prices, distances and exchange rates. And dummy region variable, Chinese vegetable areas, importers' population and GDP can also not be neglected to some extent.