A Study On Factors Affecting China's Tea Export

Black tea and green tea are the main varieties with black tea accounting for a larger rate in world. However, green tea is the main variety in China out of geographical and climatic reasons. China's green tea enjoys good quality and accounts for more than 70% of all tea in China. In recent years, green tea's function for health is highlighted and its consumption increases rapidly, bringing opportunities for China's export of tea.At the same time, China's export of tea faces a lot of challenges. There are five main tea producing countries in the world, giving China some pressure in the competition for larger market. Also, some countries are actively cultivating their own tea varieties, for example, Vietnam is cultivating green tea, which can be threats for China.Based on these, this paper finds out the important factors that make impact on China's tea exports and how they achieve this, so that it can make suggestions to promote China's tea exports. China mainly exports tea to the following regions: northwestern Africa, EU, Asia and America. As a result, the paper selects several representative countries from each region to analyze tea exports trade by modeling. Based on the previous research, the paper adopts gravity model, and the factors are GDP per capita from gravity model as well as the nominal exchange rate, green barrier and trade agreement and organization which are studied a lot. The study shows that GDP per capita has a great positive impact on China's tea exports, while nominal exchange rate and green barriers have negative impact. The trade agreements and organizations also have negative impact contrary to the expectation, which is explained reasonably in the paper.Finally, the paper summarizes the characteristics of China's tea exports, and makes recommends for its expansion: to strengthen the publicity of green tea's function for health; actively expand international market; timely get information about foreign standards of maximum pesticides usages to adjust usages; and strengthen cooperation with signatory or members of the same trade organization.