The Effects of Border Violence on U.S.-Mexican Cattle Trade

Due to local violence in Mexico and the continuation of safety concerns along the border region, some ports of entry for Mexican cattle imports into the U.S. have been closed. When a port of entry is closed, the USDA establishes temporary facilities for contingency livestock inspection to maintain the flow of trade across the US-Mexico border. The purpose of this research is to identify the border closures’ impact on the trade flows between Mexico and the United States and between different ports of entry from January 2009 to September 2014. The observed bilateral trade flows between two countries could be explained well using statistical methods involving variables as the length of border closures, geographical locations, the US cattle prices relative to Mexican prices, seasonal patterns in the US cattle imports from Mexico, the combined result of drought, and feed costs. Through the use of a regression in Stata software, a series of economic explanatory variables, and a dummy variable for port of entry openings and closure the study attempts to measure how much of impact a closed port of entry has on the nearby ports of entry.