Exporting processed food: Sri Lanka’s experience in the Asian context*

Prema-chandra Athukorala, Jeevika Weerahewa and Navaratne Bandara Kandangama

Departmental Working Papers from The Australian National University, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics

Abstract: In recent decades, there has been a palpable shift in the commodity composition of world agri-food trade away from the traditional primary (unprocessed) products mostly exported from developing countries. However, this structural change in trade patterns and its policy implications have so far received scant attention in policy making in most agricultural-resource rich developing countries. Policy makers are still wedded to the conventional division of primary products and manufactured goods that lumps together processed food with primary (unprocessed) agri-food products. This paper aims to draw attention to this policy oversight by examining the experience of Sri Lankan in processed food exports against the backdrop of the experiences of the other countries is the Asian region. The analysis uses a new dataset that systematically delineate processed food from the traditional primary good products, The analytical narrative of inter-country pattern of export performance shows that, unlike primary commodity dependence, exporting processed food is positively associated with the state of economic advancement of countries. The results of the econometric analysis suggests that export success of a country is determined by a combination of growth of world demand, the domestic agricultural resource endowment and the conduciveness of the policy regime for global economic integration.

Keywords: agri-food; processed food; trade policy; globalization; export performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 F63 N45 O13 Q17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-int and nep-sea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/20 ... ndangama_2023_13.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pas:papers:2023-13

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from The Australian National University, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Prema-chandra Athukorala ().