Food-based bilateral trade balance performances between the United States and Canada under COVID-19.

The food industry has been greatly impacted by COVID-19, causing governments to restrict food exports to prevent shortages. A negative food trade balance reveals a country's dependence on imports and underscores the significance of a sound food policy. Hence, for the first time, this study examines the J-curve hypothesis for the U.S. with Canada at the state rather than country level and creates maps based on the findings. The approach of this study differs from all empirical studies using country-level J-curve analyses, because the U.S. may require a state level analysis since its states differ in terms of economic-population sizes, tax rates, and administrative structures. For this aim, this study employs the linear and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approaches. The results indicate that while only 8 out of 47 U.S. states support the food-based asymmetric J-curve hypothesis, 15 U.S. states support the asymmetric inverse J-curve hypothesis. Additionally, 9 U.S. states support the food-based symmetric J-curve hypothesis, and 2 U.S. states support the symmetric inverse J-curve hypothesis. Based on these results, policymakers of U.S. states where the J-curve hypothesis is not supported should review their food-based bilateral trade policies with Canada. Graphical abstract: These maps depict the U.S. states in green and red, indicating support for the J-curve and inverse J-curve hypotheses, respectively. The map on the left was generated using the linear model (symmetric approach), while the map on the right was generated using the nonlinear model (asymmetric approach). Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00003-023-01436-x.

Trade Dependence, Uncertainty Expectations, and Sino-U.S. Political Relations.

This study applies a time-varying parameter/stochastic volatility vector autoregression (TVP-SV-VAR) model to explore the time-varying property of the link between Sino-US political relations and trade. The results indicate that the association of these two variables appears to be unstable. Sino-US political relations have positive and negative impacts on their bilateral trade, and the impact on Chinese imports is stronger than on its exports. In turn, Chinese imports from the US lead to political conflict, while Chinese exports promote peace. The interaction mechanism may originate from the expectations of the future trade environment caused by trade policy uncertainty. The interactions between Sino-US political relations and bilateral trade at different time points are also investigated. The results demonstrate that the link between these two variables is slightly different, depending on the specific status of the bilateral political relationship (friendly, neutral or hostile). Both China and the US should seek common interests to maintain a stable political relationship, and even with an increasing volume of bilateral trade, the risk of political conflicts should not be neglected.

To sell public or private goods.

Traditional analysis takes the public or private nature of goods as given. However, technological advances, particularly related to digital goods such as non-fungible tokens, increasingly make rivalry a choice variable of the designer. This paper addresses the question of when a profit-maximizing seller prefers to provide an asset as a private good or as a public good. While the public good is subject to a free-rider problem, a profit-maximizing seller or designer faces a nontrivial quantity-exclusivity tradeoff, and so profits from collecting small payments from multiple agents can exceed the large payment from a single agent. We provide conditions under which the profit from the public good exceeds that from a private good. If the cost of production is sufficiently, but not excessively, large, then production is profitable only for the public good. Moreover, if the lower bound of the support of the buyers' value distribution is positive, then the profit from the public good is unbounded in the number of buyers, whereas the profit from selling the private good is never more than the upper bound of the support minus the cost. As the variance of the agents' distribution becomes smaller, public goods eventually outperform private goods, reflecting intuition based on complete information models, in which public goods always outperform private goods in terms of revenue.

Assessing the Effect of Bilateral Trade on Health in the Asian Region: Does Digitization Matter?

A recurrent theme of the literature and wider public discourse is that trade and digitization are good for health as it promotes economic prosperity. The present study investigates the impact of trade and digitization on health in 12 selected Asian economies for the period 1991-2019. The study applied FMOLS and DOLS approaches for confirming the panel and economy-wise findings. The core findings of the panel FMOLS confirm the significant negative impact of trade and digitization on mortality rate, and trade and digitization have significantly positively contributed to life expectancy in selected Asian countries in the long run. The study deduces some imperative policy implications related to trade, digitization, and health, specifically for Asian economies.

Development status and strategy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Tunisia / 国际中医中药杂志

China and Tunisia have frequent exchanges and good relationship. Tunisia has the largest medical center of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) among Africa and Arab countries. The development of TCM in Tunisia has shown great potential. By searching the information and legal regulations of the Ministry of health of Tunisia, the West Asia and Africa Department of the Ministry of Commerce of China and the business office of the Chinese Embassy in Tunisia, this paper studies the development status, legislation and drug access, bilateral cooperation, market potential and risks of TCM in Tunisia. It is found that acupuncture and massage are widely used in Tunisia. However, Tunisia has strict control over the sources of TCM. It is proposed that the future development of TCM in Tunisia should be based on the advantages of good relations between China and Tunisia, obtain both government support, take acupuncture and massage as a pioneer, promote TCM, encourage and develop TCM industry.

Trade Impacts on Embodied Carbon Emissions-Evidence from the Bilateral Trade between China and Germany.

This article attempts to investigate the impacts of bilateral trade on the environment by estimating the embodied carbon emissions between China and Germany over the period 1999-2018. The above impacts are broadly explored in the literature both under the framework of theoretical and empirical analysis. However, there exist fewer empirical studies exploring the nonlinear relationship between trade volumes and carbon emissions between a well-developed and emerging economies. By applying the multiregional input-output (MRIO) model, this article aims to reveal the impacts of trade on the environment in the case of China-Germany. Specifically, trade amounts between China and Germany rank high with a similarly increasing trend and both of them are large net exporting countries. However, China experienced much larger carbon emissions embodied in its exports to Germany. Despite potential concerns on the carbon leakage issue of China from Germany, we find that the bilateral trades fit an inverse U-shape in the embodied carbon emissions, which suggests that the trade between the two countries can finally reduce carbon intensity without obstructing economic development particularly in the long-term. This paper guides policy-makers to quantify the issue of CO2 transfer among bilateral trades in order to achieve the target of trading sustainability.

Two-pathway perspective for heavy metal emission mitigation: A case study of Guangdong Province, China.

Heavy metal emissions have attracted much worldwide attention for its recalcitrance and persistence. In this study, a two-pathway environmental simulation model is developed to uncover heavy metal emissions as induced by intra-provincial production and extra-provincial investments, filling the gap of mitigating heavy metal emissions from separate pathway. This developed model is applied to Guangdong Province, China targeting on the mitigation of Hg, As, Cd, Cr, and Pb emissions. Additionally, emission reduction simulations are implemented on the basis of key sector identification. The effects of intra-provincial production reduction are more notable than those of extra-provincial investment reduction. In addition, mitigation of Hg and As emissions can be achieved through the reduction in both intra-provincial production and extra-provincial investment. In the contrast, it is not expected that the reduction of extra-provincial investment be duo to the emission mitigation of Cd, Cr and Pb. Moreover, an examination of five optimized scenarios reveals that the most remarkable emission mitigation pathway is the reduction of intra- and extra-provincial activities. This study is an indispensable reference for multi-pathway emission mitigation for heavy metals.