Trade Liberalization: Reaping Its Effects on the Agricultural Performance of the Philippines

Over the years, economists had been taught that "Trade can make everyone better off", thus the rationale of the dynamic shift in the Philippine agricultural trade system from protectionism to trade liberalization. It was known that the Philippines was one of the champions in the agriculture sector as it had massively produced agricultural goods and exports during the late 20th century. However, various studies and reports have shown and concluded that agriculture in the Philippine setting is now dubbed as the “poor man’s sector”. In this study, it has reaped the reality of the country’s stance in trade agreements as it has examined the correlation of trade openness, imports of goods, and employment to the Value of Production in Agriculture—wherein, it has resulted in distinct conclusions such as (1) trade openness has a negative impact to VPA, (2) imports of goods increase VPA by 0.094373, and (3) employment’s positive impact is estimated to be at 4570.708. The researchers suggest that such results and analysis are vital for the government sector and thus revisit the pros and cons of trade policies and weigh their net effects on the agricultural sector to which people owe their daily nutrition.

The Trade Effect of Trust: Evidence from Agricultural Trade between China and Its Partners

High trust is a booster of trade development, while low trust is a stumbling block. The trust between two countries (regions) will be beneficial to sustainable development for bilateral trade. To investigate the impact of trade partners’ trust on the scale of China’s agricultural export trade, we put trust into the analytical models of international trade, propose a research hypothesis based on the transaction cost economics theory, and construct an extended gravity model for empirical tests. The results show that the level of trust affects the scale of export trade by affecting the size of transaction costs. Higher trust produces trade creation effect, while lower trust produces trade barrier effect. The trade partner’s trust significantly affects the scale of China’s agricultural export trade, and the effect is heterogeneous at different percent quartiles. Even after controlling the endogeneity, the conclusion still holds. We suggest that, in the international trade of agricultural products, the government should constantly improve the quality of formal institution, attach importance to constructing of the informal institution of trust and enhance the social trust to facilitate the development of agricultural trade.

Are there dynamic productivity gains from agricultural trade?

PurposeThe primary purpose of this paper is to take an in-depth look at the question of whether liberalizing trade in agriculture can generate dynamic productivity gains comparable to those in the manufacturing sector.Design/methodology/approachIn contrast to the manufacturing sector that has generated firm/plant-level trade data, there is a lack of farm-level trade data that are needed for empirical measurement of dynamic productivity gains. Therefore, the authors use thought experiments to analyze the sequence of events that would occur when trade is liberalized for agriculture; delineate the expected behaviors of the actors involved in the trade and draw inferences about whether there would be dynamic productivity gains from agricultural trade.FindingsThe central finding is that there would be little dynamic gain from agricultural trade at the farm level due to the limited role of producers in shaping their international competitiveness. Yet, agricultural trade may generate dynamic gains if states or input supply corporations respond to the freer trade environment by making more investments for research and development (R&D). Further, when intraindustry prevails, there can be productivity gains at the industry level due to the transfer of resources from less to more efficient farm producers.Originality/valueThe findings of the paper are expected to present insights into value for researchers working in the area of agricultural trade; for agricultural trade policymakers in developing countries and for trade negotiators engaged in reforming or designing World Trade Organization (WTO)’s trade rules for agriculture.