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China's African swine fever (ASF) outbreaks, which started in 2018, severely damaged the country's pig and sow herds and created serious pork supply shortages. This resulted in high domestic market prices and record amounts of imports in both 2019 and 2020, but also severely impacted its domestic consumers. It casts doubts on whether China's long-standing self-sufficiency strategy, including its recently communicated 95% self-sufficiency target, can be sustained. Recent data, however, suggest that China is experiencing a rapid recovery in pig production, leading to depressed domestic market prices. This study characterizes the recovery process and analyzes the underlying drivers, such as active responses to the ASF outbreaks, a multiple-prong government initiative towards supporting the pig producers, de facto relaxations of newly introduced environmental regulations, large increases in domestic investment, and a reorganization of the pig sector, featuring more scale operations. However, the rapid recovery has also resulted in decreasing prices, economic losses of producers, and dampened export opportunities for China's trade partners. This paper, therefore, also analyzes these unintended consequences and explores supply-side measures that may enable the long-run viability of the self-sufficiency goal in the presence of high dependency on imported feed. Through a model-based numerical simulation analysis, we find that supply-side measures, such as yield improvement, can substantially reduce reliance on import feed but can only increase domestic pork production marginally, while technical efficiency improvement in pork production has the largest potential in boosting domestic pork production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's tariff liberalisation as part of its WTO accession application and eventual agreement has been thoroughly analysed in the literature. However, much of this literature is based on forward-looking ex-ante analyses and few studies provide empirical evidence on its actual impact. We fill in this gap by evaluating empirically the welfare effects of China's actual tariff liberalisation on Chinese farmers during the 1997-2010 period. By estimating the domestic market price effects of China's tariff liberalisation and the associated wage earning effects, we find that on average Chinese farmers were able to gain more from reduced consumption prices than they would lose from reduced agricultural and wage income due to tariff liberalisation. Welfare gains over time are estimated to be positively correlated with the actual degrees of tariff liberalisation, implying that relatively more gains were realized immediately before and after China's WTO accession in 2001, as compared to the more recent period when relatively little liberalisation was carried out. Farmers' rising non-agricultural income and increasing consumption shares of non-agricultural products are important determinants of these positive average welfare effects. Moreover, welfare gains from tariff liberalisation are shown to be distributed unevenly across Chinese provinces and income levels, with farmers located in coastal provinces and at higher income levels gaining more than their counterparts in remote provinces and at lower income levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – This paper therefore aims at systematically estimating the agricultural trade induced farm employment effects in China. Design/methodology/approach – Using detailed agricultural trade and production data during 1994-2009, the authors estimate the "labor contents" of agricultural trade flows and use these estimates to compute the farm employment effects. Findings – The authors find that China's agricultural trade has indeed generally developed along its widely believed comparative advantages and disadvantages; however, the farm employment "creation" effect due to labor-intensive exports has actually been dominated by the employment "substitution" effect due to increased land-intensive imports, thereby mostly resulting in negative net farm employment in the post-WTO accession era. Originality/value – Findings from this first systematic attempt to estimate the trade-induced farm employment effects do not lend support to the popular notion that increased agricultural trade would help increase farm employment and have important implications for evaluating current and future trade policy in China and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expiration of the WTO Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) in January 2005 coincided with surges of China's apparel exports and apparent increases in China's cotton imports, the former of which has led to trade conflicts between China and its main trading partners, and the latter of which has seemingly prompted China to relax its restrictions on cotton imports. Using monthly trade data, this study employs a vector autoregression model to investigate the interlinkages between China's and its competitors’ apparel exports to the EU and between China's apparel exports and its cotton imports. Our analysis shows that (1) there appears to be a downward-sloping and elastic demand curve for China's apparel products by the EU; (2) China's and its competitors’ apparel exports to the EU are imperfect substitutes and the “crowding out” effects of Chinese apparel exports seem to be modest in the EU market; (3) the interrelationship between China's apparel exports and its demand for imported cotton is found to be statistically significant. However, increased apparel exports from China induce proportionally larger increases in its cotton imports. In particular, the end of the ATC is shown to boost China's apparel exports by nearly 16%. This increase “magnifies” China's demand for imported cotton by 75%. This discrepancy is possibly due to the relaxation of China's import restrictions on cotton following the end of the ATC which led to the extra boost in China's cotton imports. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]