The Effect And Mechanism Of Food Safety Standards On China's Food Export

Food export is an important driving force of China's foreign trade.Recent years,consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about health and food safety.As a result,many countries have taken various measures to restrict trade so as to protect nationals,which forms great barriers to China's food export.Standards are a kind of normative documents defined to regulate market order within a certain range.As an important part of international trade rules,the implementation of standards will help improve the competitiveness of export products,so as to ease the resistance brought by technical barriers and achieve sustained and healthy development of China's food export.The impact of standards on trade is one of the hot issues of research in bilateral and multilateral trade.In theory,standards tend to promote export through the quality effect,but may also impede export due to the cost effect.Thus,its impact on trade is not clear.Different empirical studies usually found different results.The main reason may be that they referred to different samples,and different measures of standards.Previous empirical studies mainly focus on standards used by the importing countries.However,little attention has been paid so far to the effect of exporting countries' standards on export.Due to the lack of data,the evidence on how China's standards affect export is rather scarce.In addition,while there is quite a large literature on the effect of standards on exports,we know a good deal less about how standards work in practice.After reviewing existing literature,this paper focus on standards implemented by the exporting country,and explores the relationship between safety standards and food export.The empirical results confirm the trade enhancing potential of standards.We find that a larger stock of food safety standards in China is associated with expanding food exports.And the push effect of standards is larger when they are voluntary implemented.We further set up a mediation model to test the mechanism of the trade promoting effect,which makes up for the gaps in the existing literature.The results show that the enhancing of export quality is an important reason for export expanding.The promotion effect of standards on export is obviously reduced when the export quality have been controlled.Our results may provide theoretical support and empirical evidence for constructing standardization policy in China.First,the development of standards has a significant effect on exports.Therefore,the government should continue to deepen the standardization process,improve the standard management system and ensure the reasonable growth of the standards.Second,it is necessary to focus on the development of voluntary standards and optimize the structure of the standards system.Finally,standards are the key to quality promotion.The government should also strengthen the food technology research and development.Last but not least,enhancing the standard technical level and improving product quality may also be helpful to promote a sustained growth of food exports in China.