Browsing by Subject "Freihandelsabkommen"

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Assessment of non-tariff barriers in food and agricultural trade : an empirical approach
(2015) Engelbert, Tanja; Brockmeier, Martina
Non-tariff barriers (NTBs) substantially govern and influence trade outcomes. They include a diverse range of policy and non-policy measures that directly or indirectly divert trade and are predominantly implemented on food and agricultural products. While multilateral negotiations of NTBs within the World Trade Organization (WTO) are a slow process, countries are more confident in accelerating the reduction and regulation of NTBs within free trade agreements (FTAs). Thus, considering NTBs might be of importance in analyzing potential effects of FTAs. This cumulative dissertation includes six articles addressing current research questions in agricultural economics on the identification of NTBs and their effects on trade and the evaluation of FTAs that explicitly consider NTBs. In all empirical analyses, the focus is on the agro-food sector. The first two articles serve as the foundation for policy analysis. The following articles draw on a two-step empirical approach to thoroughly assess regional trade liberalization by integrating econometric results from the theory-consistent gravity model into the computational general equilibrium (CGE) model Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) given a perfect match of data. The empirical analyses illustrate and reaffirm the high relevance of NTBs in the agro-food sector that by far exceeds tariffs. The use of different specifications of the gravity model and alternative identification strategies supports the stability of results. The joint econometric-CGE approach offers an appropriate and comprehensive framework for analyzing the effects of the reduction of NTBs in the process of economic integration. Extending the CGE model and augmenting the database with econometrically estimated parameters increase the quality and confidence of CGE-based assessments of deep FTAs. The reliability of the results is further increased by considering the most disaggregated level of data. Future research analyses might apply even more disaggregated data and rely on direct measures of NTBs by employing information from newly emerging databases on NTBs. To conduct CGE policy analyses, theory-consistent aggregation methods could be applied to obtain ad-valorem equivalents (AVEs) of NTBs at the CGE sector level. The composite-method approach that was selected for this thesis could be transferred to other case studies of regional trade liberalization. In addition, the method could be used to construct a detailed database of AVEs of NTBs for the CGE framework. This would enable one to conduct reliable and precise plurilateral and multilateral liberalization scenarios by considering NTBs.