Coffee Export Competitiveness in China and Vietnam: A Comparative Gravity Analysis of Demand, Supply, and Trade Policy, 2001 to 2022

Despite geographical proximity and broadly similar agro -climatic conditions, China and Vietnam show sharply divergent coffee export performance, with Vietnam ranking as the world’s second largest exporter, while China’s exports remain modest. This study compares the determinants of their bilateral coffee exports over 2001 to 2022, using a gravity model estimated by Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood with partner and year fixed effects, a specification that retains zero trade flows and absorbs global price and demand shocks. Once these common shocks and fixed bilateral factors are controlled, trading-partner demand characteristics such as GDP, population, and urbanization are not robust determinants of exports for either country. The most consistent determinant is domestic production, which is positively associated with exports for both nations and helps explain their divergent export scale. Domestic consumption cannot be separated cleanly from production, so it is not interpreted as crowding out exports. On the policy dimension, Vietnam’s WTO accession shows a positive association with exports while China’s Belt and Road participation shows none, but these are institutionally different forms of integration and are read as associations, rather than causal effects. The findings carry implications for sustainable development, linking producer competitiveness to livelihoods under Goal 1, growth and decent work under Goal 8, and the balance between domestic and export use of production under Goal 12.