Trade and SPS Regulations: The Importance of Being Earnest?

There is a pending question regarding the impact of food safety standards promulgated by governments or imposed by buyers from the private sector. Their effects on the capacity for developing countries to access developed countries’ markets for high value agricultural and food products is a vivid research theme that up-till-now provided mixed results. While some advocates that food safety standards may hamper exporting abilities, others present evidence that they enable competitiveness and act as a pro-poor growth. This paper contributes to this debate. We offer an analysis on how the intensity of trade flows in fruits and vegetables in Central American countries, Dominican Republic and the U.S. respond to both the level of Sanitary and Phytosanitary regulations and to products reputation on the U.S. market subsequent to import detention/refusal. We emphasize the specific case of non-traditional horticultural products introduced in Central American countries in the 70s and 80s under structural adjustment frameworks. To this end, we implement a gravity model of bilateral trade flows to (1) identify the effect through time of food safety standards on exports from Central America to the US, and (2) measure the degree of adaptation to detention/refusal what we define as resilience of the supply chains. First (and highly preliminary) results show that there is indeed a negative relationship between unit prices and reputation on export markets.SPS – Agricultural Trade – Reputation – Alerts, International Relations/Trade, F13, O13, Q17,

Reputation matters: Spillover effects in the enforcement of US SPS measures

This paper uses a novel dataset on US food import refusals to show that reputation is an important factor in the enforcement of sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) measures. The strongest reputation effect comes from a country’s own history of compliance in relation to a particular product. The odds of at least one import refusal in the current year increase by over 300% if there was a refusal in the preceding year, after controlling for other factors. However, the data are also suggestive of the existence of two sets of spillovers. First, import refusals are less likely if there is an established history of compliance in relation to other goods in the same sector. Second, an established history of compliance in relation to the same product by neighboring countries also helps reduce the number of import refusals. These findings have important policy implications for exporters of agricultural products, particularly in middle-income countries. In particular, they highlight the importance of a comprehensive approach to upgrading standards systems, focusing on sectors rather than individual products, as well as the possible benefits that can come from regional cooperation in building SPS compliance capacity.Product standards; SPS measures; Import refusals; Developing countries

Climate change, private sector and value chains : constraints and adaptation strategies working paper

This work was carried out under the Collaborative Adaptation Research Inititive in Africa and Asia (CARIAA), with financial support from the UK Government's Department for International Development and the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.Understanding how climate change will affect private sector activities and incentives as well as markets is key to understanding the overall economic but also social and environmental impacts of climate change in arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs). The private sector and market work package fosuses on private sector actors as key agents of change, with "private sector" actors defined here in a broad sense, encompassing both smallhoder farmers and large multinational companies. Although those actors are heterogeneous and sometimes have very different rationalities, the core constraints (such as limited access to finance, markets or natural resources) influencing their decision-making are often similar. Moreover, these actors are not acting independently from each other; they interact direclty or indirectly within value chains or through the use of resources and assets. For instance, they compete on the use of labour, land and water

Reputation matters: Spillover effects in the enforcement of US SPS measures

This paper uses a novel dataset on US food import refusals to show that reputation is an important factor in the enforcement of sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) measures. The strongest reputation effect comes from a country’s own history of compliance in relation to a particular product. The odds of at least one import refusal in the current year increase by over 300% if there was a refusal in the preceding year, after controlling for other factors. However, the data are also suggestive of the existence of two sets of spillovers. First, import refusals are less likely if there is an established history of compliance in relation to other goods in the same sector. Second, an established history of compliance in relation to the same product by neighboring countries also helps reduce the number of import refusals. These findings have important policy implications for exporters of agricultural products, particularly in middle-income countries. In particular, they highlight the importance of a comprehensive approach to upgrading standards systems, focusing on sectors rather than individual products, as well as the possible benefits that can come from regional cooperation in building SPS compliance capacity

Reputation matters: Spillover effects in the enforcement of US SPS measures

This paper uses a novel dataset on US food import refusals to show that reputation is an important factor in the enforcement of sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) measures. The strongest reputation effect comes from a country’s own history of compliance in relation to a particular product. The odds of at least one import refusal in the current year increase by over 300% if there was a refusal in the preceding year, after controlling for other factors. However, the data are also suggestive of the existence of two sets of spillovers. First, import refusals are less likely if there is an established history of compliance in relation to other goods in the same sector. Second, an established history of compliance in relation to the same product by neighboring countries also helps reduce the number of import refusals. These findings have important policy implications for exporters of agricultural products, particularly in middle-income countries. In particular, they highlight the importance of a comprehensive approach to upgrading standards systems, focusing on sectors rather than individual products, as well as the possible benefits that can come from regional cooperation in building SPS compliance capacity

Trade and SPS Regulations: The Importance of Being Earnest?

There is a pending question regarding the impact of food safety standards promulgated by governments or imposed by buyers from the private sector. Their effects on the capacity for developing countries to access developed countries’ markets for high value agricultural and food products is a vivid research theme that up-till-now provided mixed results. While some advocates that food safety standards may hamper exporting abilities, others present evidence that they enable competitiveness and act as a pro-poor growth. This paper contributes to this debate. We offer an analysis on how the intensity of trade flows in fruits and vegetables in Central American countries, Dominican Republic and the U.S. respond to both the level of Sanitary and Phytosanitary regulations and to products reputation on the U.S. market subsequent to import detention/refusal. We emphasize the specific case of non-traditional horticultural products introduced in Central American countries in the 70s and 80s under structural adjustment frameworks. To this end, we implement a gravity model of bilateral trade flows to (1) identify the effect through time of food safety standards on exports from Central America to the US, and (2) measure the degree of adaptation to detention/refusal what we define as resilience of the supply chains. First (and highly preliminary) results show that there is indeed a negative relationship between unit prices and reputation on export markets