Assessment of Non-Tariff Measures and Their Impacts on International Trade and Competitiveness of Cambodia and Thailand
The objective of this research was to investigate the effect of non-tariff measures, technical and non-technical measures, which imposed by 41 main trading partners of Cambodia, on its exported agricultural products. This research used one of the most famous international trade models known as Gravity model. A multiple regression analysis was run between dependent variable, the export value of Cambodia agricultural products and the independent variables consist of GDP of trading partners, Border, Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS), Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), and Pre-Shipment Inspection and other formalities (PSI) included in technical measures, and the Non-technical measures or Non-technical barriers (NTB). The Ordinary Least Square (OLS) combined with Bootstrapping technique were employed to estimate model’s sample parameters and robust standard errors for statistical tests. The empirical results of this research showed that the SPS and PSI imposed by the trade counterparts of Cambodia had a significant negative impact on its exports. This study had further revealed that GDP of importers had a positive significant effect on export value of Cambodia. More interestingly, the closer the countries to the border of Cambodia, the greater the trade flows which supported the idea of the Gravity model.
Keywords: NTMs, Gravity Model, OLS, Bootstrapping
