A Gravity approach to evaluate the significance of trade liberalization in vertically-related goods in the presence of non-tariff barriers

A gravity-based model is developed to explain bilateral trade flows in primary and processed agri-food commodities. It innovates by explicitly accounting for the vertical production linkages between primary and processed agri-food products, tariffs, and subsidies and by estimating the restrictiveness of non-tariff barriers in the upstream sector. Our application focuses on cattle/beef trade flows between forty-two countries. The structural parameters of the model are used to simulate trade flows under various scenarios of import tariffs and domestic and export subsidies reductions. The United States and Australia emerge as the exporting countries that stand to benefit the most from cuts in tariffs and subsidies as bovine meat imports in the European Union and Japan significantly increase. A bootstrap procedure is used to generate confidence intervals around predicted trade liberalization outcomes.