Trade costs, trade facilitation, and agrifood exports in Central Asia
| dc.contributor.advisor | Zuo, Alec | |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Pomfret, Richard | |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Adamson, David | |
| dc.contributor.author | Sharafeyeva, Alfinura | |
| dc.contributor.school | Centre for Global Food and Resources | en |
| dc.date.issued | 2021 | |
| dc.description.abstract | With tariffs now at historic lows, WTO members and researchers are tackling another challenge to improve trade flows – reducing the trade costs. The 2017 Trade Facilitation Agreement identified that trade facilitation can provide mechanisms to reduce trade costs. However, the scale and scope of the impact of trade facilitation on trade flows are still debated due to complexity and ambiguity of the trade facilitation term. The goal of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the effects of trade costs on agrifood exports in Central Asia. The findings are expected to assist policymakers in allocating resources to maximise the gains from trade facilitation. This research provides in-depth analyses of trade facilitation definitions, measurements of trade facilitation indicators and estimation techniques applied in econometric models that are broadly used in trade facilitation studies. Systematic literature review and a gravity model of international trade were employed to address the key questions posed in this thesis. The systematic literature review, based on critical analysis of 181 papers, supports the view that improvement of international trade depends on a complex relationship between social, environmental, and economic factors. However, ambiguous results for the impact of these factors on trade flows suggest a need for careful analysis of existing data on trade facilitation, estimation techniques and dataset specification. Analysing Central Asian exports with the commonly used gravity model and the World Bank’s Doing Business indicators results in nonsensical theory-inconsistent estimates. This is especially true for disaggregated agricultural products, where the logistics of agrifood trade differs from the assumptions used in the Trading Across Borders (TAB) segment of the Doing Business dataset. The TAB indicators are not only imprecise but have biases associated with geography, e.g. landlocked countries, and the composition of trade, e.g. share of agricultural products, that reduce the value of using the TAB indicators in cross-country regressions. The problems, exacerbated by the discontinuity of the TAB indicators after changes in assumptions in 2016, suggest that there is a need to find alternative data sources and estimation techniques for the impact of trade costs on perishable and non-perishable products in Central Asia. The Corridor Performance Monitoring Mechanism (CPMM) trade cost indicators from the Asian Development Bank, an alternative data source based on traders’ actual experience as compared to the perception-based TAB indicators, is found to be more appropriate for analysing and measuring the impact of trade costs on exports of Central Asian countries. Improved trade facilitation is particularly beneficial for perishable agricultural products as compared to other commodity groups. Econometric analysis of trade cost indicators and trade is sensitive to the choice of estimation techniques, such as inclusion of a full-set of fixed effects between the country-pairs. This suggests that researchers need to follow the most recent advances in gravity model theory. From a policy perspective, such sensitivity of the results to the choice of indicators and of econometric method suggests careful consideration be given to trade facilitation budget allocation. The potential gains from trade facilitation are certainly large, but imprecise estimation approaches may give misleading results of the size of gains and of where the policy impact can be greatest. | en |
| dc.description.dissertation | Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Centre for Global Food and Resources, 2021 | en |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/2440/134199 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en |
| dc.provenance | This electronic version is made publicly available by the University of Adelaide in accordance with its open access policy for student theses. Copyright in this thesis remains with the author. This thesis may incorporate third party material which has been used by the author pursuant to Fair Dealing exceptions. If you are the owner of any included third party copyright material you wish to be removed from this electronic version, please complete the take down form located at: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/legals | en |
| dc.subject | Trade costs | en |
| dc.subject | agrifood exports | en |
| dc.subject | trade facilitation | en |
| dc.subject | Central Asia | en |
| dc.title | Trade costs, trade facilitation, and agrifood exports in Central Asia | en |
| dc.type | Thesis | en |
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