How migrants’ food tastes shape international agro-food trade

ABSTRACT

We identify and quantify the effect of food tastes on international trade flows. Based on a novel data set including all ingredients in the national dishes of 171 countries, we construct a measure for similarity in food tastes between countries. We identify the effect of tastes on bilateral food trade flows by exploiting that migrants’ tastes differ from the tastes of their host country. Our results show that the effect of migration on trade decreases the more similar tastes are between a migrant’s country of origin and her host country. Thus, we can show that tastes do matter for international trade flows, and are able to quantify their effect.

KEYWORDS:

• Preferences
• international trade
• migration
• food

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• F1

Acknowledgments

We thank an anonymous referee, Mike Kalish, and the participants of the seminar in labor markets and macroeconomics at the University of Zurich in November 2018 for helpful comments and suggestions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The data set is available upon request from the authors.

² We add 1 to $M$ whenever $M$ is zero so that we do not loose those observations when we take logs.

³ Based on model (4) in Table 1, we also estimate the effects from the cross-section for every year separately. The results are similar to the panel estimates. In fact, the effects of migration on food imports at the mean similarity of 0.35 are all around 0.21 for every year in our sample (all effects are statistically significant at the 1% significance level).