The Impact of Country Reputation on Export Quality of Agricultural Products

Country reputation is considered to be an important factor that impacts export quality. Most literature focuses on theoretical frameworks of country reputation, while few studies provide empirical support for theoretical findings. Using the data of 324,183 observations representing 131 countries exporting153 agricultural products from 1996 to 2011, this paper investigates the extent to which country reputation matters for export quality. The results strongly suggest that country reputation has a positive and significant impact on export quality and the effect is more pronounced for highly differentiated products. These results are robust to various checks. Moreover, the heterogeneous effects of country reputation on quality upgrading are identified when the sample is split based on different classifications.