The Influence Of Japan’s TBT On China’s Agricultural Exports

Agricultural export trade level can promote rural employment, increase farmers’ income, optimize industrial structure of agriculture and improve international competitiveness of agricultural products. Japan is China’s largest agricultural export market, it is also a country which implements TBT measures strictly.Our country’s agricultural exports to Japan increased from$5.72billion in2002to$10.99billion in2011. Although the exports increased nearly twice, the proportion of Japan’s total share of China’s agricultural exports declined from one third in2002to18%in2011. There are some reasons for this trend. Firstly, China’s exports of agricultural products to Southeast Asian countries increased year by year. Secondly, Japan implemented increasingly stringent technical barriers to trade, especially in2006, the implementation of the "positive list" system inhibited China’s agricultural exports seriously. Meanwhile, the financial crisis occurred in2008also had a bad impact on it. Against this backdrop, this paper mainly focuses on the impacts of Japan’s TBT on China’s agricultural exports, its path and degree.Japan’s TBT in Japan has a strong representation, and has a significant impact on China’s exports of agricultural products. The present paper analyses the economic effects of the TBT in Japan from the theoretical angle, and studies main factors in the process by empirical methods.Based on the definition of TBT and relevant literature, the paper studies the impacts of TBT on China’s agricultural exports to Japan through situational, theoretical and empirical analysis. Firstly, it defines TBT in Japan and explaines its characteristics. Secondly, it focuses on the status quo of China’s agricultural exports to Japan and the main manifestations of agro-technical barriers in Japan. Thirdly, it summarizes trade, welfare and industrial effects by the implementation of TBT, and illustrated by some graphs. Fourthly, by gravity model and least squares method, it conducts some empirical analysis of China’s agricultural exports to Japan. Finally, it puts forward some concrete measures against TBT from perspectives of government, industry associations and enterprises.This paper mainly studies the impact of Japan’s TBT that Japan sets on China’s exports of agricultural products. Moreover, it takes an empirical analysis of Chinese eel exports to Japan. Such a case is indicative of the whole agricultural exports. In addition, the paper conducts a comprehensive analysis of economic effects of TBT, from the perspective of short-term and long-term effects. These are innovative parts of the paper.