China’s trade with the world doubled after joining the WTO. This study attempts to identify and measure quantitatively the effects of changing economic environment and trade policies on China’s global agricultural imports as well as imports from theEU. The approach is to model behavioral relationships in the agricultural trade between China and the EU by using annual trade data from 1986 to 2005. The results indicate that Chinese agricultural imports are relatively inelastic to absolute price changes, but relative price changes significantly affect the market shares of EU exports due to price competition. Trade liberalization in the form of tariff reductions is trivial in changing the quantity of China’s agricultural imports from the EU. Rapid income growth has fuelled most of China’s increased appetite for imported agricultural products.
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