The Relation between Trade Liberalization and Food Security over 40 Years of Reform and Opening up in China: An Application of Global Food Security Index

• Main Authors: Ya-Ting Yang, 楊雅婷
• Other Authors: 張靜貞
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/put745

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 農業經濟學研究所 === 107 === Food self-sufficiency rate has been the major food security measurement tool in China for a very long time period. This study uses the Global Food Security Index (GFSI) constructed by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) which can be divided into three sub-indexes, namely affordability, availability, and quality and safety. To ensure the robustness of the GFSI, we use different standardization and weighting methods including the Z-score standardization and the weights calculated by the hierarchical data envelopment analysis (H-DEA) and compare with the results from the original EIU''s standardization and weights. The results show that the GFSI of China has increased continuously during the past 40 years and the total score has increased by 2-3 times. Furthermore, we find that in the early stage of the reform, the score of food affordability sub-index is the highest and the most important one among the three sub-indexes. Later, the importance of food availability has declined, while quality and safety sub-index has better scores over time. Nevertheless, the affordability is the fastest growing sub-index and its score has increased about 8 times since the reform. With the technological progress in China’s agricultural system, food quality and safety sub-index has also increased about 2 times while availability has increased 57 percentage points. Furthermore, in order to analyze the relationship among trade liberalization and food security, we use the Spearman rank correlation method to calculate the correlation coefficients of food self-sufficiency rate, trade freedom index, agricultural product tariff and trade dependence. We find that China’s food self-sufficiency rate is significantly and negatively correlated with trade liberalization, while GFSI was significantly and positively correlated with trade liberalization. Therefore, we conclude that there is a positive correlation between food security and trade liberalization in China.