The food and agribusiness industry accounts for almost 10% of global consumer spending and has an estimated total value of USD 8 trillion. Given its considerable contribution to the gross domestic product, governments employ a diverse range of trade instruments to balance their product deficits while protecting domestic producers.
When considering the imports into a market, the policy makers often consider a critical volume of imports beyond which imports become too much. Imposing an absolute quota is one way to deal with problem, however, the World Trade Organization (WTO) members as part of the 1996 Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture forbade the use of quantitative trade restrictions.
Among alternative mechanisms in agricultural international trade, tariff rate quotas (TRQs) constitute an interesting case and have been the centre of attention in bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations. A TRQ includes a two-tiered tariff, which applies a lower tariff for imports up to a specified quota limit and a higher tariff for subsequent imports above the quota limit.
In this research, we investigate the dynamics of TRQ systems while incorporating logistics and supply chain management perspectives.
The logistical factors play a significant role in global agricultural supply chains and, hence, are taken into consideration by importers when choosing their import strategies. Motivated by the real-world application of the TRQ systems, we discuss how logistical factors, such as lead-time, transportation channels, and warehousing influence the behaviour of global agricultural supply chains and affect the overall performance of TRQ systems under an FCFS administration.
Publications
Hezarkhani, B., S., Asian, A. Mansouri. Global Agricultural Supply Chains under Tariff Rate Quotas. Working paper.
Research team
Meet the Principal Investigator(s) for the project
Dr Behzad Hezarkhani - Dr. Hezarkhani is a senior lecturer at Brunel University Business School. He is the programme leader for the MSc program Global Supply Chain Management (GSCM).
Before joining Brunel in 2018, he was an Assistant Professor at Nottingham University Business School. Prior to that, he was a post-doctoral fellow and adjunct lecturer at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. He received his PhD at Faculty of Business Administration at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, where his doctoral dissertation won the 2010 Canadian Purchasing Research Foundation (CPRF) scholarship.
The primary area of his research addresses decentralized operations management and employs operations research, mathematical modelling, and game theory. Dr. Hezarkhani studies problems pertaining to cooperation and competition in a wide range of areas, e.g. inventory management, scheduling and production, transportation and logistics, and sales and marketing. His research appeared in journals such as Production and Operations Management, European Journal of Operational Research, OR Spectrum, and Journal of Scheduling among others.
Partnering with confidence
Organisations interested in our research can partner with us with confidence backed by an external and independent benchmark: The Knowledge Exchange Framework. Read more.
Project last modified 08/09/2021