The Effects of Border Violence on U.S.-Mexican Cattle Trade
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Date
2015-08-10
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Abstract
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. The aspects explored are 1) the closure forcing Mexican ranchers to transport their animals to the other ports of entry, causing the diversion of the cattle imports from Mexico or 2) its decreasing of the bilateral aggregate trade.
This research will identify and quantify the determinants of bilateral cattle trade between the United States and Mexico from January 2009 to September 2014. Data are collected from the World Institute for Strategic Economic Research (WISERTrade) and the United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service’s Global Agricultural Trade System (the USDA FAS GATS). 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 United States 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.
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.
Using the ordinary least squares estimator (OLS) and the seemingly unrelated regression (SUR), the effects of border violence on U.S.-Mexican cattle trade are determined. Given more benefits of using SUR for this study, the analysis indicates that the port closure at the Presidio port of entry has a statistically positive effect on the number of cattle crossings through the Santa Teresa port of entry and the temporary facility offsets the effect of port closure. The observed bilateral trade flows between two countries is explained well using SUR. This study illustrates that violence along the U.S.-Mexican border changes the flow of bilateral cattle trade; the ports are both positively and negatively impacted by border closures independent from distance.
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seemingly unrelated regression, ordinary least squares, international cattle trade, Mexico and United States, border violence, port closures