Still a Barrier to Trade? A Review of

Since the FDA’s adoption of HACCP standards in 1997, there has been concern that these standards have continuously acted as a barrier to trade for seafood exports from developing countries. This study compares trade data of seafood exports to the U.S with the refusal data from the FDA, in order to determine if there is a continuous negative effect of the FDA’s stringent standards on trade across the top seafood exporting countries to the U.S. Overall, it is found that the bulk of seafood refusals are from developing countries, notably a small group of lower‐middle income Asian countries who are also some of the largest exporters of seafood to the U.S. Relative to how much they trade, developing countries actually have had better or roughly equivalent compliance rates at the U.S border, and there were no differential effects found on the impact of refusals on trade for any of the top seafood exporting countries. Learning was not observed with this data for any of the top exporting countries to the U.S, implying more research may be required at the firm level in these countries to continue studying ‘standards as barriers’.