Analysis Of The Factors Influencing China’s Soybean Import Trade

Since the mid-1990s, China’s domestic demand for soybean and related products has increasedsharply, but the growth in domestic soybean production is really slow. It resulted that our countryturned into a net importer from a net exporter of soybean. The imports have a linear upward trend. Ahuge amount of imported soybean has occupied domestic soybean market and domestic soybeanindustry is threatened to some extent. This paper used econometric models to analyze the factorsinfluencing China’s soybean import trade. It has important theoretical and practical significance.This paper firstly gave an overview on import and export trade status of soybean, focusing onanalysis of the status quo of China’s soybean import trade. Then it discussed several factorsinfluencing China’s soybean import trade like the production and consumption of soybean and relatedproducts, the trade policy of soybean and related products, the advantage of soybean abroad, foreignexchange and multinational grain merchants. It used Co-integration test and granger causality testwith actual data from FAO1986-2008to verify relevant factors. It concluded that there is a long-termequilibrium relationship between the consumption of soybean oil and soybean meal and the import ofsoybean. It also concluded that export price of US soybean has an influence on China’s soybean priceand affects the import of soybean indirectly.In the next part of this paper, through the establishment of the Gravity Model, using pool datafrom year1991-2008related to the model to explore the major factors influencing China’s soybeanimports, it concluded the direction and level of how every single factor influences the soybean importtrade. It concluded that China’s population, the consumption of soybean oil and soybean meal, theratio of soybean yields of the source countries to soybean yields of China, the change of China’ssoybean trade policy have a positive impact on China’s soybean imports; the GDP of China, theexchange rate of US dollar against the RMB, the distance between source countries and China have anegative impact on China’s soybean imports.