The Impact of Quarantine Policies on the Quality of Imports

In a contribution to the sparse literature on the impacts on consumers of quarantine restrictions, an innovative approach to analyzing the effects of these policies on the prices and quality of imported products is proposed. Specifically, various index number decompositions at different aggregation levels are considered for extracting quality changes from changes in the value of an imported good. Consistent with theory, an empirical application to mango imports for Australia reveals an increase in the quality of the imported bundle after the introduction of a new quarantine restriction. We believe this to the first empirical evidence of the quality impact of biosecurity restrictions on imports