The agro‐food sector has experienced a profound transformation of contractual arrangements along the value chain, coinciding with important technological innovations and product quality upgrading. Our understanding of the impact that this transformation has had on trade flows in the agricultural sector is very limited. In particular, we have limited knowledge about the extent to which the patterns in agro‐food trade have been driven by the quality of contractual institutions. Using existing measures which capture the sensitivity of agro‐food products to contractual imperfections, we show that countries with better contract enforcement specialise in the production of food which requires higher level of relationship‐specific investments. We also find that countries with better contracting institutions and producing contract‐intensive goods specialise in exporting high quality foods. In addition, we show that the quality of contracting institutions might importantly affect the process of product quality upgrading.

中文翻译：

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签约机构，农产品贸易和产品质量

在重要的技术创新和产品质量提升的同时，农业食品行业经历了价值链上合同安排的深刻变革。我们对这种转变对农业部门贸易流的影响的理解非常有限。特别是，我们对合同制机构的质量在多大程度上推动了农产品贸易模式的了解有限。使用现有的方法来捕获农产品对合同缺陷的敏感性，我们表明，合同执行力更好的国家专门从事食品生产，而食品生产需要较高的针对关系的投资。我们还发现，订约制度更好的国家和生产合同密集型商品的国家专门出口高质量的食品。此外，我们表明，签约机构的质量可能会严重影响产品质量升级的过程。