RCEP and China–ASEAN Agricultural Trade: Combining the Gravity Model with Stochastic Frontier Analysis to Identify Trade Potential and Diversion_Vol. 3 No. 4 (JSE 2026)_Journal of Statistics and Economics (ISSN: 3005-5733)

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RCEP and China–ASEAN Agricultural Trade: Combining the Gravity Model with Stochastic Frontier Analysis to Identify Trade Potential and Diversion

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.62517/jse.202611412

Author(s)

Chang Tingting

Affiliation(s)

School of Marxism, Chongqing Jiaotong University, Chongqing, China

Abstract

China and ASEAN form one of the world's largest agricultural trading pairs. Bilateral agricultural trade reached US$43.01 billion in 2020, and ASEAN ranked China's second-largest source of agricultural imports at 15.6 per cent of total value. This paper combines the gravity model with the time-varying stochastic frontier gravity model to estimate the determinants, efficiency, and unrealised potential of China–ASEAN agricultural trade over 2009–2023 and to identify whether the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), in force from January 2022, has produced trade creation or diversion. Using HS chapters 1–24 bilateral trade data from UN Comtrade with standard covariates from CEPII and World Development Indicators, the gravity equation identifies positive effects of GDP per capita, common border, and shared language, and a negative effect of distance. The stochastic frontier extension recovers mean trade efficiency of approximately 0.58, with values above 0.70 for Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia but below 0.40 for Brunei, Laos, and Myanmar. A treatment-dummy specification shows that RCEP entry is associated with statistically significant trade creation of 11–14 per cent in agricultural flows without detectable diversion from non-member suppliers. The binding constraint on further integration is the efficiency gap, not market access; the marginal returns to non-tariff facilitation exceed those to further tariff cuts.

Keywords

RCEP; Agricultural Trade; Gravity Model; Stochastic Frontier Analysis; Trade Potential; Trade Diversion; China–ASEAN

References

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