Abstract - Quest for Global Competitiveness - Universidad de Puerto ...

Ln Dist it/jt is the Natural log of distance between Guyana and each of its tradingpartners. It is measured as „000 Kilometres and was obtained from the CEPII database,which calculates distance as a weighted average of the distance between the economiccenters 7 of the countries, which may or may not include the capital, using the geodesicapproach.Distance is used as a proxy for several cost factors that separately affect trade (Head2003) such as: transport costs; time elapsed during shipment; synchronization costs;communication costs and transaction costs. These costs increase with distance.Therefore, ceteris paribus, the coefficient distance is expected to be negative.Ln STRJ it/jt is an index used to capture the stringency of each country‟s food safetystandard. It was constructed based on the inventory approach and determined by thefollowing criteria:I = ∑ t CUM Std i / CUM Std codexThat is, I is a cumulative comparison of the regulation of each country against CODEXrecommended guidelines.Where I ≥ 0 ~ ≥ 1I ≥ 1, country i‟s standards are on par with or are more stringent than the recommendedCodex guideline.I ≤ 1, country i‟s standards are more lax than the recommended Codex guideline.The following criterion is used to determine Std iStd it= Tol j i ≥ Tol j c7 This is based on the geographic distribution of the population (2004) within each state. The distanceformula used is a generalized mean of city-to-city bilateral distances, weighted by population developedby Head and Mayer (2002): d ij = (∑ kЄi (pop k /pop i ) ∑ eЄj (pop e /popj) d θ ke) 1/θWhere: pop k , is the population of agglomeration k belonging to country i and θ, measures thesensitivity of trade flows to bilateral distance.10