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The increasing policy interests and the vivid academic debate on non-tariff measures (NTMs) has stimulated a growing literature on how NTMs affect agri-food trade. The empirical literature provides contrasting and heterogeneous evidence, with some studies supporting the ‘standards as catalysts’ view, and others favouring the ‘standards as barriers’ explanation. To the extent that NTMs can influence trade, understanding the prevailing effect, and the motivations behind one effect or the other, is a pressing issue. We review a large body of empirical evidence on the effect of NTMs on agri-food trade and conduct a meta-analysis to disentangle potential determinants of heterogeneity in estimates. Our findings show the role played by the publication process and by study-specific assumptions. Some characteristics of the studies are correlated with positive significant estimates, others covary with negative significant estimates. Overall, we found that the effects of NTMs vary across types of NTMs, proxy for NTMs, and levels of details of studies. Not negligible is the influence of methodological issues and publication process.

Intra-industry trade (IIT) has become a widespread phenomenon with a growing role in international trade, though agricultural trade is usually neglected in empirical works. This article identifies the determinants of horizontal and vertical intra-industry agri-food trade between New Member States (NMS) and the EU-27 in 1999–2010, by applying static and dynamic models with different specifications to panel data. Results show that IIT is mainly of a vertical nature in the NMS, though the majority of NMS export low quality agri-food products to EU-27 markets. Factor endowments are negatively related to agri-food horizontal intra-industry trade (HIIT), but positively to vertical intra-industry trade (VIIT). Economic size is positively and significantly related to both types of IIT, while distance and IIT are found to be negatively related in both cases. Results also suggest that HIIT and VIIT are greater if a New Member State exports agri-food products to another NMS while EU accession has had positive and significant impacts on both HIIT and VIIT, suggesting that economic integration fosters IIT.

This study develops an import demand model to explore the role of income in explaining the trade performance of low-, middle- and high-income countries with a special emphasis on Brazil, Russia, India and China – the BRIC economies. The study estimates the impact of the growth in per capita income on the trade of agrifood products using data from 52 countries and 20 agrifood products for the years 1990–2006. The results suggest that China, Russia and Brazil now have more income elastic import demands than other middle-income countries. Conversely, the income elasticities of import demand in India are similar to other low-income countries and for the most part statistically equal to zero.

The structure of Hungary’s food trade expansion over the period 1995–2003 and its implications for labour market adjustment are examined. The contributions of the paper are threefold. First, we test the sensitivity of results to the choice of measurement and their implications for the results. Second, we introduce more industry-specific control variables. Third, we distinguish the short- and long-run adjustment effects. Our results provide some support for the smooth-adjustment hypothesis of intra-industry trade. Estimations confirm that industry-specific variables may have a significant effect on adjustment costs.

The main objective of this article is to examine econometric estimates of price elasticities of food trade functions. We investigate the relevance of the prominent gravity approach. This approach is based on the assumptions of symmetric, monotone, homothetic, Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) preferences. We test all these assumptions using intra-European trade in cheese. In general, the assumptions made on preferences by the gravity approach are not supported by our dataset. The bias induced in the estimated price elasticities is ambiguous.

Starting from a theoretically consistent gravity model, this paper first provides estimates of bilateral 'border effects' in food trade among Quad countries (Canada, USA, Japan and EU) at the ISIC 4-digit level. Then, it investigates the underlying reasons of border effect, assessing the role played by policy barriers (tariffs and non-tariff barriers) with respect to barriers unrelated to trade policy, such as information related costs and cultural proximity. In contrast with several previous findings, we show that policy barriers are part of the story in explaining the strong trade reduction effect induced by national borders, and this is especially true when we control for the endogeneity of trade policy to imports, as suggested by political economy arguments. Moreover, our results show that elements linked to cultural proximity and consumer preference for home goods, matter a great deal in explaining the magnitude of border effects. The trade reduction effect induced by these policy-unrelated components are from 1.5 to 3 times larger than that induced by policy barriers. These results have implications for the economic and welfare significance of national borders.

The common presumption that food-importing developing countries would be harmed by a liberalization of world food trade is questioned in this paper. Both theory and new empirical modelling evidence suggest the possibility of the opposite conclusion. Even if just advanced industrial countries were to liberalize their food trade, the present empirical analysis (using a model of world food markets) suggests that economic welfare and net foreign exchange earnings from food trade could improve for the vast majority of developing countries. The extent to which that gain would be greater if developing countries also were to liberalize their policies affecting food markets is shown as well. The analysis helps to reconcile differences between previous results using partial-equilibrium models and those derived from computable general equilibrium models.