Impacts of Australia’s free trade agreements on trade in agricultural products: an aggregative and disaggregative analysis

The importance of free trade agreements (FTAs) has been increasing as such agreements help reduce barriers to trade. This paper estimates the agricultural trade creation and export diversion effects of Australia’s free trade agreements (FTAs) at the aggregate and disaggregate levels, using the Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood (PPML) estimator. It includes 24 of Australia’s major trading partner countries comprising FTA and non-FTA members and covers 22 years from 1996 to 2017. The heteroscedasticity robust regression error specification test (RESET) confirms the relevance of PPML over the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) estimator. Results showed that China–Australia, Korea–Australia, Australia–USA and Japan–Australia have larger trade creation effects in the agricultural sector. At the commodity level, variation in trade creation effects is estimated from the different trade agreements. Among the selected commodities, the larger effects were generated in trade in sugar and wine by the implementation of the majority of the trade agreements. Overall, the trade creation was greater than the export diversion of the FTAs. The findings of the study have implications for Australia’s future trade agreements.

自由贸易协定（free trade agreements, FTAs）的重要性日益凸显，此类协定有助于降低贸易壁垒。本文采用泊松伪极大似然估计（Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood, PPML估计量），从总体和细分层面估算澳大利亚自由贸易协定（FTAs）对农产品贸易创造与出口转移的效应。研究涵盖澳大利亚24个主要贸易伙伴（含FTA成员与非FTA成员），时间跨度为1996年至2017年共22年。异方差稳健的回归误差设定检验（heteroscedasticity robust regression error specification test, RESET）证实，PPML估计量相较于普通最小二乘法（Ordinary Least Square, OLS估计量）更为适用。结果显示，中澳、韩澳、澳美及日澳自由贸易协定对农产品的贸易创造效应更为显著；在商品层面，不同协定的贸易创造效应存在差异，其中多数协定实施后，糖与酒类贸易的效应尤为突出。总体而言，自由贸易协定的贸易创造效应大于出口转移效应。本研究结果对澳大利亚未来贸易协定的制定具有启示意义。