Assessing the Impact of SPS Regulations on U.S. Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Exports

Sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures are not new, but their significance in international agrifood trade continues to grow. Much less is known about the trade-restricting potential of these measures because of the difficulty in identifying when SPS regulations exist and how and to what extent they are applied. We develop a novel database of SPS treatments affecting United States exports of nine fresh fruits and vegetables and a formal econometric model to investigate the traderestricting nature of these measures. The results suggest that SPS treatments generally reduce trade, but the actual restrictiveness of these measures diminishes as U.S. exporters accumulate treatment experience and vanishes when exporters reach a certain threshold.