Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Tokyo Wholesale Tuna Market

Abstract

The study investigated how the changes in the hours spent at home during the COVID-19 pandemic affected the Tokyo Toyosu bluefin, bigeye, and yellowfin tuna markets. Applying the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) price models for the three tuna products during the four state of emergency (SOE) periods between 2020 and 2021 in Tokyo, the study reveals that an increase in the hours of stay-at-home during the first SOE had an adverse impact on all three tuna prices in the long run. The study also finds that for the bluefin tuna, an increase in the hours of stay at home had a positive impact on price in the short run when the hours of stay at home were increasing during the first SOE. This suggests that there were times when household demand for bluefin tuna increased while people spent longer in their homes during the SOE period.

Keywords:

• Bluefin tuna
• COVID-19
• state of emergency
• stay at home

JEL CLASSIFICATION CODES:

• C13
• Q21
• Q22

Notes

1 Tokyo Toyosu market succeeded the Tsukiji market, which has long been the single global price leader for bluefin tuna, although the prices are determined by auction and mainly traded among the local (Tokyo Metropolitan area) buyers and sellers of the market (Sun, Chiang, Squires, Rogers, & Jan, 2019).

2 The details of the way the medium price is calculated at the Tokyo Toyosu market is explained in MAFF (n.d.).