An Empirical Analysis On Rice Exports Of Vietnam And China

Rice is one of the three largest cereal varieties and remains as the staple food for nearly half of population in the world. Moreover, rice plays the significant role in international trade among agricultural products. In recent years, with the adjustment of rice production and export policy among leading Asian rice producing countries, rice export competition has been intensified. Vietnam and China are the main rice producing countries in the world and rice exports are assumed to be one of the engines of economic growth of both Vietnam and China. So, which factors affect to the rice export of Vietnam and China and there is any competition between them. To clarify this issue,commodity-specific gravity model was used to investigate the influenced factors to Vietnam's and China's rice exports to its major trading partners after World Trade Organization accession and A Constant Market Share model was employed to compare the rice export performance of Vietnam and China. The main conclusions are as follow:The empirical results from China's rice exports analysis revealed that,excepting distance, the remained variables including Gross Domestic Product, population, income,exchange rate, production and price had statistical significance and correlated with the total exports as hypothesised. Moreover, the determinants of China's rice exports highly depended on the components of exporter side than that of importer sides. As of Vietnam's rice exports analysis, the results reported that only the factors from Vietnam, including Gross Domestic Product, population, income, exchange rate, production and price determined the volume of Vietnam's rice exports to its recipient countries. The similarity in climate, meteorology and target markets result in a great similarity in the determinants of Vietnam and China's rice exports.The results of decomposition analysis underlined that the structural effect was the most dominant contributors to the increase in rice export growth of Vietnam and China in the first period 2000-2008. However, the decomposition of structural effect, competitive effect and growth effect have been more significant in affecting rice export growth of Vietnam and China in the second period 2008-2014. Generally, rice export orientation of both Vietnam and China to target markets was remaining stable during the studied periods.In which, China's rice exports have been suffered a highly intense competitiveness from Vietnam's exports in Philippine,Singapore,Africa and Middle East markets. Further,the competitiveness index indicated that China's export growth (to the target markets) was stronger than that of Vietnam in the first sub-period (2000-2008), but the case changed in the second sub-period (2008-2014). The main reason was that China's rice exports being fluctuated greatly over years, so the rice export volume of China to its targets markets was also unstable. Specifically,China's rice export volume to Vietnam was stronger than that of Vietnam to China.