An Empirical Analysis On The Influencing Factors Of China's Edible Mushroom Export

With economic globalization and the further acceleration of trade liberalization, edible mushroom has become one of China's important export commodities. China's export of edible mushroom in 2009 has suffered great pressure from global financial crisis, but it still had earned foreign exchange for 10.2 billion US dollars, and in the mean time the import of it was only 0.07 billion dollars. Edible mushroom are among the most significant agricultural products offsetting the trade deficit for China. Traditional tariffs had been cut largely among partner countries since China joined in WTO, however, the non-tariff trade barriers encountered by the exportation of China's Agricultural products has been rising sharply. As for the exportation of edible mushroom, it is mainly affected by external trade protectionism, policies adopted by importers, market supervision, the quality of mushroom and many other factors. Those factors have imposed great restrictions on China's export of edible mushroom and have caused evident decrease of it in recent years. For example, the year 2006 and 2009 witnessed the remarkable export decline of the mushroom. And then the development of domestic mushroom industry could be affected, which might have an adverse effect on augmenting farmers' income as well as on sustainable development of rural economy.In this context, this research is conducted to study China's mushroom export status and characteristics and the main factors obviously influencing the trade flow of mushroom, which is certainly of theoretical and realistic significance to explore the ways of maintaining China's export competitive advantage of edible mushroom. With comparative advantage theory and trade protection theory, this paper, based on the methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis, synthesis and comparison, makes a systematic research on factors of China's edible mushroom export. This paper has ascertained China's mushroom export characteristics and restriction factors, and drawn the following conclusions:(1) China's mushroom share is the highest in the international market. Netherlands' mushroom market has the trend of gradual decline year by year. France's mushroom market has always been on the decline curve. Germany's mushroom market is relatively stable. China's mushroom trade competitiveness index keeps a higher level in the weak fluctuation and the trade surplus shows a strong competitiveness. The Netherlands'trade competitiveness index has always been positive. Although the index declined, the country is still a powerful competitor of mushroom international trade. France and German's edible mushroom products lack competitive power. The RSCA Index shows that China's edible mushroom products have absolutely competitive advantage, the Netherlands followed, and France and German are in a relatively inferior position. Comprehensively, competitiveness index shows that edible mushroom products in the Netherlands were the strongest while France and German have a certain advantage. China's international competitiveness has gradually been increasing in recent years.(2)Price, which plays a decisive role on supply and demand in the market, affects edible mushroom export as well, especially in Gravity ModelⅡof dried champignon and ModelⅢof canned agaricus bisporus. Exchange rate, an important factor affecting the export price, has played a significant role in modelⅡandⅢ, which means appreciation of RMB can result in a little drop in mushroom trade value. So despite the international pressure, the policy to prevent the RMB from being raised quickly is favorable to edible mushroom export.(3)From export resources endowment advantage and importer demand of edible mushroom, China's edible mushroom industry has advantage in export resource endowment. The results of models also verify that the importer's GNI increase can pull up their import demand of China's edible mushroom. So the edible mushroom industry should be prior in China's agricultural export. China's export of edible mushroom product can give priority to the countries that have stronger national purchasing power and whose economy can continue to rapidly develop.(4)The results of gravity model shows that on the one hand, the standardization construction of edible mushroom in China contributes insufficiently to export, and its role against Technical Barriers to Trade is limited, which is opposite to the rapid development of industrial standardization in recent years. On the other hand, the coefficients of variables of SPS and TBT in three models are consistently negative, which fully indicate that technical barriers have prevented the mushroom's export. Conspicuously, in modelⅡ, the restriction degree of reporting time to export value has achieved 1.42. Negative impact of TBT and SPS report is significant so that it can't be ignored.The innovations in the dissertation as bellow:(1) Research perspective. This paper, taking the export trade of mushroom as the research object, based on the present situation of its export, theoretically and empirically analyzes some influence factors which may occur in its export trade and has arrived the relevant conclusions. Finally, this paper put forward some suggestions based on the above conclusions.(2) Content innovation. This paper collects the detailed data of edible mushroom from China Customs Statistics Yearbook in the year 1997-2009 (the data from 1997 to 2000 was not integrated), combining with the data of FAO statistical database. It analyzes the current situation of Chinese mushroom export trade and the status in the world market. Based on this, this paper analyzes the possible factors which restrict China's mushroom export from theoretical and empirical aspects and draws reliable conclusions to some extent.