Quality of Chinese Agricultural Products Exported to Japan 2001-2017: Econometric Descriptive Nested Logit Analysis

Abstract

Improving the quality of agricultural products is a key issue that needs to be urgently addressed in China's agricultural development. The top market for China's agricultural exports is Japan, so the quality of agricultural products exported to Japan is directly related to the overall trend of China's agricultural exports. Therefore, this study examined the spatial and temporal evolution of the quality level of China's agricultural exports to Japan based on HS 9-digit coded data on Japan's imports of agricultural products from 158 countries around the world from 2001 to 2017, using the Nested Logit Method. The results indicate that the quality of China's agricultural products exported to Japan during the data period generally shows a fluctuating downward trend. And, the overall quality of China's agricultural products is in the middle level of the world, but there is a large gap between the quality levels of different categories. Low-quality varieties of agricultural products account for nearly 50 percent of the total, while high-quality agricultural products account for less. In terms of quality, China’s agricultural products lack competitiveness in Japan. To this end, China should vigorously improve the pesticide regulatory policy, implement standardized production, and establish production advantage zones for special agricultural products.