Alibaba Business School, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China.
School of Social and Public Administration, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China.
PLoS One. 2022 May 10;17(5):e0266904. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266904. eCollection 2022.
In order to explore the sustainable growth of Chinese agriculture, this paper assesses how the heterogeneous SPS measures affect China's growth margins and quality upgrading in the agricultural sector. We estimate improved gravity-model that exploit the cross-country differences in SPS measures over the period from 2000 to 2014. Our findings show that the heterogeneous SPS measures restrict the intensive margin and extensive margin, but significantly promote the product quality-even with no significant effect on price index. Conditional on quality upgrading, the heterogeneous SPS measures decrease the extent of quality upgrading. On one hand, because of cross-country differences in SPS standards, standards from developed countries have less effective trade effect on China's agri-products export quality upgrading; On the other hand, because of cross-firm differences in the ability to deal with SPS standards, the laggards in China have the higher probability to switch to lower entrance barrier countries. Therefore, it is possible for China to trap in the low-quality agricultural growth in the long term.
为了探索中国农业的可持续增长，本文评估了异质的 SPS 措施如何影响中国农业部门的增长幅度和质量升级。我们利用 2000 年至 2014 年期间各国 SPS 措施的差异，对改进的引力模型进行了估计。我们的研究结果表明，异质的 SPS 措施限制了农业部门的集约边际和扩展边际，但显著促进了产品质量——即使对价格指数没有显著影响。在质量升级的条件下，异质的 SPS 措施会降低质量升级的程度。一方面，由于 SPS 标准存在国家间差异，发达国家的标准对中国农产品出口质量升级的贸易效应较小；另一方面，由于企业应对 SPS 标准的能力存在差异，中国的落后企业更有可能转向进入壁垒较低的国家。因此，从长期来看，中国有可能陷入低质量的农业增长陷阱。
