Research on China’s Export of Agricultural Products to the U.S.—Based on Trivariate Marginal Analysis

As a major agricultural country and a major agricultural trade country, China and the U.S. are of great significance in strengthening the supply chain of agricultural products, promoting international food security cooperation, and promoting global economic development. China and the U.S. have been important agricultural trade partners of each other for many years, and the two countries have close agricultural trade relations. This paper collects and collates the trade data of 816 agricultural products with six-digit HS codes from 2002 to 2019. Utilizing the cutting-edge research technique of export growth factor analysis, it examines the extensive margin, price margin, and quantity margin of China’s agricultural product exports to the U.S. as well as the extent to which these three marginal variables affect export competitiveness. The empirical study demonstrates that the extensive margin is the primary driver of China’s increasing agricultural exports to the U.S. The basic mode of China’s agricultural products exporting to the U.S. to win by volume has fundamentally changed, and the increase of its export trade volume mainly depends on the continuous increase of the types of agricultural products exported. The price margin can effectively improve the competitiveness of China’s agricultural exports to the U.S. in the short term. It has an obvious pulling effect on the export of China’s agricultural products to the U.S., and the price margin has the most obvious impact on the competitive advantage.