Tadashi was telling me about this fascinating fact: Japan has been criticized by the US government for protecting its apple market from US apples. This has been a 30-year-battle at the WTO. The Japanese apple market was self-supplied by Japanese apple growers. But, now Japan has become a net exporter of apples and is increasing its export dramatically to its neighbouring countries (what happened in 2002???). I have heard that Japanese apple grower associations are spending a decent amount of money in R&D for the last couple of decades to improve its quality (apparently, these apples are way better than their New Zealand or Chinese counterparts). Is this protectionism work?
3 comments:
Our dear friend Rinako Oka is actually working to promote Japanese apples here in Geneva. Would be interesting to hear her view on this!
Hi,
Japanese fruit is like the Rolls Royce of the fruit world. Looks beautiful and very tasty as well. Only catch is that it costs the earth.Same thing with Japanese beef which is also exported.Quality, of course, explains all.
Now how would we empirically test if Japanese apples are exported due to their quality rather than their price ...
Richard Baldwin
Belatedly, I looked up why Japanese apple exports rise suddenly in 2002. It's the year Taiwan, the biggest importer of Japanese apples, joined the WTO, taking away the import quota and lowering the tariff. That caused a huge surge in exports. The Japanese apples that were sold in Switzerland were a hit in the Christmas seasons too. An example of successful product differentiation?
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