《Free_Trade_Area_on_China’s_International_Agricultural_Trade_and_Its_Regional_Development》.pdf

China World Economy / 77 90, Vol. 15, No. 4, 2007 77 Impact of China ASEAN Free Trade Area on China’s International Agricultural Trade and Its Regional Development Huanguang Qiu, Jun Yang, J ikun H uang, Ruijian Chen* Abstract This study aims to examine the impa ct of t he China ASEAN Free Trade Area (CAFTA) on China ’s international agricultural trade and its regional agricultural development, using the Global Trade A naly sis Proj ect model and the China Ag ricultural D ecision Supp ort Sys tem. Our analys is showed that: (i) CAFTA will imp rove resource allocation effi ciencies f or both China and ASEAN and willp romote bilateral agricultural trade and, hence, will have p ositive eff ects on the economic development of both sides; (ii) CAFTA will accelerate China ’s expo rt of t he ag ricultural commod ities in which it has compa rative advantages, such as vegetables, wheat and horticultural p roducts, but at the same time bring about a large increase in impo rts of commodities such as vegetable oil and sugar; and (iii) CAFTA will have signifi cantly vary ing imp acts on China ’s regional agricultural develop ment because of l arge diff erences in the agricultural p roduction structure in each reg ion. Our results indicate that agriculture in the northern, northeastern and eastern reg ions of China will benefit f rom CAFTA, whereas agriculture development in southern China will suff er. Those regional sp ecifi c imp acts are quite diff erentf rom the eff ects brought by multilateralf ree trade treaties, such as those of the WTO, which usually have po sitive eff ects on south China but negative impa cts on the northern and western pa rts of China. Key words: free trade area, agri