US phytosanitary restrictions: the forgotten non-tariff barrier
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to provide new evidence that the US phytosanitary regime is associated with a restrictive market access environment for fruit and vegetable products. One chief reason seems to be that the US regime uses a positive list approach, under which only authorized countries can export. Design/methodology/approach The methodology of the paper is primarily qualitative. This paper reviews the US sanitary and phytosanitary measures (SPS) system and its scope for use to protect markets, in addition to protecting life and health. The approach is institutional and political economic. Findings For most products, only a portion of global production is authorized for export to the USA. Even among authorized countries, only a small proportion is actually exported. As a result, the number of countries exporting fresh fruit and vegetables to the USA is far lower than those exporting to countries like the EU and Canada, but it is on a par with markets known to be restrictive in this area, such as Australia and Japan. Using a data set of fruit and vegetable market access and political contributions, this paper also provides evidence showing that domestic political economy considerations may influence the decision to grant market access to foreign producers. Originality/value The US SPS system has not previously been analyzed in this way, and the distinction between negative and positive list approaches is highlighted in terms of its implications for third-party exporters. Similarly, the analysis of political contributions is novel and suggestive of an important dynamic at work in the determination of the US policy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".