Macro Evaluation On The Quality Of Export Aquatic Product

The development of globalization and regional economic integration lead to the expansion of world trade and the diversification of trade goods.According to the working paper from FAO,seafood is the most popular food commodity traded in the world.China is the largest producer and exporter of aquatic product,the export value reached 19.567 billion US dollars in 2015.Which is way higher than other animal protein sources,such as pork($322 million),frozen chicken($272 million)and beef($44 million).That is to say,aquatic product export is very essential to China.However,there existed a lot of unsolved problems,especially the threat to the quality and safety of aquatic product in China,the technical barriers to trade from some developed countries and low profit margin of the exported seafood product.In order to improve the development of the international trade in aquatic product and optimize its structure,this study quantified the quality of exported seafood product and explored its impact on the trade.This paper studied the aquatic products quality of the leading 27 exporters from 2006 to 2015.Based on the previous studies,the quality premium effect is further subdivided into structure effect(SE)and quality effect(QE),where SE is the ratio of high-value and low-value exported aquatic products,and QE is quality improvement excluded the impact of SE.Furthermore,the index of trade competitiveness and international market share were applied to analyse the changes of seafood product trade and the market competitiveness of the main exported commodities.Based on the above,a trade gravity model contained the difference of the quality premium was established,the data source was the related data from the 12 importer of Chinese exported seafood product during the same studied period.It is revealed that the developing countries of Asia and Africa primarily export lower quality product,when compared with the major developed countries and some South American countries.Especially Norway and the United States and other leading exporters,the quality of their exported aquatic product is quite close to the world average.While the quality of the exports from China had improved steadily,to be more specific,the quality was around the world average from 2006 to 2011 can be attributed to the structure effect.Although the structure effect went down a little bit since 2013,the quality effect increased because of the improvement in the quality and competitiveness of seafood.Last but not least,if there exist the difference in quality of the seafood product between trading partners,the scale of the trade will be expanded as the difference get large.This only happens when the exporter enjoyed the quality premium.In order to improve the quality of the exported seafood and the export structure,the suggestions are as follows: First and foremost,further research on the comprehensive benefit of aquatic product should think highly of the quantification of quality.Then,the government and the fisheries cooperatives should strengthen the regulation and supervision on seafood quality,and step up efforts to push the development of aquatic processing industry.As for the exporters,they should develop new market and less their dependency on single market.