Changes of China’s agri-food exports to Germany caused by its accession to WTO and the 2008 financial crisis
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate changes of China’s agri-food exports to Germany caused by China’s accession to WTO and the global financial crisis in a quantitative way. The paper aims to detect structural breaks and compare differences before and after the change points.
Design/methodology/approach
The structural breaks detection procedures in this paper can be applied to find out two different types of change points, i.e. in the middle and at the end of one time series. Then time series and regression models are used to compare differences of trade relationship before and after the detected change points. The methods can be employed in any economic series and work well in practice.
Findings
The results indicate that structural breaks in 2002 and 2009 are caused by China’s accession to WTO and the financial crisis. Time series and regression models show that the development of China’s exports to Germany in agri-food products has different features in different sub-periods. Before 1999, there is no significant relationship between China’s exports to Germany and Germany’s imports from the world. Between 2002 and 2008 the former depends on the latter very strongly, and China’s exports to Germany developed quickly and stably. It decreased, however suddenly in 2009, caused by the great reduction of Germany’s imports from the world in that year. But China’s market share in Germany still had a small gain. Analysis of two categories in agri-food trade also leads to similar conclusions. Comparing the two events we see rather different patterns even if they both indicate structural breaks in the development of China’s agri-food exports to Germany.
Originality/value
This paper partly originally proposes two statistical algorithms for detecting different kinds of structural breaks in the middle part and at the end of a short-time series, respectively.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
JEL Classification — C13, F14, Q17
This paper was funded by the National Social Science Fund of China (14CGJ028, 13AGJ008), Social Science Research Common Program of Beijing Municipal Commission of Education (SM201410011009), Beijing Social Science Fund Project (13JDJGC053) and the Capital Circulation Research Base (JD-2012-ZD-01).
The paper was partly finished when the first author was working as a research assistant in the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics at the University of Paderborn, Germany. The authors would very like to thank the editor and the two referees for their useful comments and suggestions, which helped to improve the quality of the paper clearly.
Citation
Guo, Z., Feng, Y. and Gries, T. (2015), "Changes of China’s agri-food exports to Germany caused by its accession to WTO and the 2008 financial crisis", China Agricultural Economic Review, Vol. 7 No. 2, pp. 262-279. https://doi.org/10.1108/CAER-11-2013-0152
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited