Evaluation of Non-Tariff Measures for African agricultural exports to the EU in a CGE framework

Aida Gonzalez Mellado, Stephan Hubertus Gay, Robert M'Barek and Emanuele Ferrari

No 332012, Conference papers from Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project

Abstract: This paper evaluates the role of Non-Tariff Measures (NTMs) on agri-food trade between the EU and Africa. Given that the effects of NTMs cannot be generalised across products and regions the analysis considers several agricultural and horticultural products exported from Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Morocco, Uganda and South Africa. In these five countries 95 exporters were interviewed to obtain first hand information on five types of obstacle to exports: taxes and subsidies, customs and procedures, standards and regulations, specific limitations, and distribution chain and infrastructure. Indices corresponding to these five items were built and were integrated into an econometric analysis based on the approach presented by Fugazza (2008) to obtain estimates of the NTM effects on bilateral trade between the EU and the African countries. The values obtained from the econometric analysis were transformed into ad valorem tariffs equivalents (AVEs), and introduced into a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to study the effects of their presence and removal. The simulation results indicate the potential outcome of removing selected obstacles. From the econometric results, findings point to an overall positive effect resulting from standards and regulations, as well as from improvements in transportation, packaging, handling and preserving of African agricultural products. These findings provide empirical evidence on the effects of NTMs on African exports of agricultural products to the EU. They also support previous theoretical studies in which significant impacts are expected when standards and improvements are introduced into the agri-food export chain (Beghin, 2001).

Keywords: International Relations/Trade; International Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/332012/files/4739.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:ags:pugtwp:332012

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Conference papers from Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().