Impact of SPS Measures on theImportQuality of China s Agricultural Products

The paper is aimed to examinethe role Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS)measures play inquality upgrading of China’s imported agricultural products.Based on export data to China from UN Comtrade on agricultural products on the HS6-digit level from 156 countries in 2002-2017, this paper employed Proximity-to-the-Frontier Modelto discover the upgrading effect SPS measures haveafter measuring the qualitywith Nested Logit Model. The study foundthatimplementingSPS measures exertsa long-term positive effect on quality upgrading.Particularly,SPS measures tend todiscouragebulk agricultural products close toworld frontierfrom innovation andquality upgrading,exhibiting a more pronounced opposite of the escape-competitioneffect.Therefore, it is recommended thatChinese quarantine and market supervisiondepartments shouldlearn from the inspection processes of developed countries in relation to agricultural products and appropriately refine SPS measures to improve the quality of agricultural importsfor the health and safety of domestic consumers.