| Abstract: |
The global food marketing network is being constantly reshaped, providing
opportunities and challenges to the use of information and communication
technology (ICT) to develop international trade in food products. ICT is
likely to be especially important for food products such as fresh fruit and
vegetables that are differentiated and sensitive to timeliness in supply,
possess varied quality dimensions, and involve considerable supply
accumulation and assortment. Digital ICT (Internet and mobile phones), in
particular, is expected to facilitate international trade and encourage
efficiency in the fruit and vegetables marketing system in two main ways.
First, it reduces communication and search costs through cheaper and more
effective media. Second, it improves market information and corrects
information externalities along the supply chain, by promoting greater price
transparency and enabling consumer preferences and tastes to be more precisely
met. We employed a gravity model of international trade to test the hypothesis
that ICT positively affects bilateral international trade in fruit and
vegetables between member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies
in the period from 1997 to 2006. Explanatory variables include the usage of
the Internet, mobile telephones and fixed telephone lines, and a broad range
of factors that might determine the value of bilateral trade such as income
per capita, population, distance between trading partners and common language.
A Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood model was estimated in order to handle
zero trade observations and reduce biases caused by heteroskedasticity.
Empirical results were not quite as expected, with relatively minor impact of
digital ICT. They suggest that using digital ICT has significant positive
effects on trade in fruit and vegetables between APEC countries only for the
Internet in exporting countries. A stronger positive impact was discerned for
the traditional form of ICT, fixed telephone lines in exporting importing
countries. Nevertheless, fostering the development of digital ICT
infrastructure and its diffusion should make exporters in APEC countries more
competitive in the fruit and vegetables supply chain through the Internet
effect, and boost their trade values in these products. |