The Mechanism And Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Income Gap On The Quality Of Imported Food In China

With the emergence and development of the theory of overlapping demand and the theory of non-homothetic preference,more and more scholars at home and abroad have begun to pay attention to the impact of demand on trade quality.This paper builds a theoretical model based on non-homothetic preference hypothesis,and uses the Chinese customs micro-enterprise database to explore the impact of changes in income gap on the quality of imported food in China from both theoretical and empirical aspects.The conclusions obtained in this paper are as follows:(1)Overall,the income gap between China's provinces is significantly positively correlated with the quality of imported foods.The widening income gap contributes to the improvement of the quality of imported food.Specifically,the income gap between China's provinces is increased by 1%,and the quality of imported food in China is increased by 0.09%;(2)The impact of income gap on the quality of imported food is related to the level of per capita income.When the per capita income exceeds a certain level,the increase in income gap will increase the quality of imported food.When the per capita income level is low,the income gap between China's provinces and the quality of imported food will be negative;(3)The impact of changes in income gaps on the quality of imported food varies by region.For the more developed eastern regions,the widening income gap is beneficial to the improvement of the quality of imported food in China's provinces.For the central and western regions,the impact of the increase in income gap on the quality of imported food is not significant;(4)In addition,for products with different degrees of differentiation,the impact of income gap on the quality of imported foods is different.For long-quality foods,the income gap has a greater impact on the quality of imported foods;(5)Quantile regression results show that the impact of income gap on the quality of imported food is related to product quality.For foods of medium and below quality,the increase in income gap will significantly promote the quality of imported food.While for higher quality foods,the positive effect of income gap is not obvious.