| dc.description.abstract | Almost half of the tomatoes consumed in the U.S. are imported. In 2014, Mexico accounted for more than 80 percent of the tomato imports and Canada for around 10 percent, being the two largest importers of fresh tomato. The accelerated increase of Mexican exports of tomato into the United States has resulted in trade disputes with domestic growers. Under this perspective, the role played by agricultural and economic policy to cope with these matters is studied. Tests for endogenous breakpoints provide information about any policy or economic intervention that could have caused a structural change in the tomato industry from 1970 until 2014. The empirical analysis uses a Vector Autoregressive Model (VAR) model in which the innovation accounting method and Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) are used to show causal flow of information between the variables of interest in contemporaneous time. Results show breakpoints for imports from Canada, imports from Mexico and imports from the rest of the world. This suggests that NAFTA and pricing policies might have caused structural changes especially in the tomato importing industry. DAGs also reveal that these factors have important implications in the tomato industry changing causal relations among variables of interest. Therefore, this study indicates that agricultural policies do affect the underlying causal structure of the U.S. tomato industry. | en |
