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oai:figshare.com:article/34027956 2026-09-29T22:01:32Z category_575 portal_316 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

Data Sheet 1_Economic and environmental correlates of EU food trade: no evidence of an emission-oriented sourcing pattern.pdf Dušan Steinhauser (25139274) Anabela Luptáková (25139277) Vladyslav Bato (25139280) Elena Kašťáková (25139283) Food Packaging, Preservation and Safety agricultural greenhouse gas emissions environmental sustainability EU food trade food neo-colonialism Linder hypothesis structural gravity model sustainable food system trade-environment nexus Introduction<p>This paper examines the environmental dimension of EU food trade with third countries over the period 2010–2021, asking whether bilateral trade patterns show evidence of an emission-oriented sourcing pattern consistent with the food neo-colonialism and ecologically unequal exchange hypotheses.</p>Methods<p>A theoretically consistent structural gravity model is estimated by Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML) with a full set of exporter-by-year, importer-by-year and country-pair fixed effects, controlling for multilateral resistance and time-invariant bilateral confounders. A second-stage regression relates the estimated country-year effects to country-specific economic and environmental characteristics. Inference is based on clustered standard errors and a pair-level bootstrap.</p>Results<p>The first stage provides evidence of a Linder-type effect on the export side: the more alike two partners are in labour productivity, the larger the food flows between them. In the second stage, increases in a country’s own labour productivity show the strongest and most robust association with both its capacity to export food and its propensity to import it, while partner-country research and development intensity is positively associated with EU exports and negatively with EU imports. The environmental variables, by contrast, carry little explanatory power: neither partner agricultural greenhouse gas emissions per capita nor the partner’s renewable-energy share is significantly associated with either trade direction. The only significant environmental term is the dissimilarity in agricultural emissions per capita on the export side over the full period, and it enters positively — EU exports rise as partners become less alike in emissions. Because the measure is an absolute difference, it does not reveal whether partners have higher or lower emissions than the EU, and it therefore provides no support for an emission-oriented export pattern.</p>Discussion<p>The evidence shows no emission-oriented sourcing pattern in EU agri-food trade. Because the analysis relies on territorial rather than embodied emissions and on a single aggregate food category, it is not a direct test of the food neo-colonialism hypothesis; it does, however, indicate that economic characteristics, labour productivity and research intensity, are more robustly associated with EU agri-food trade than any of the environmental indicators considered here. For sustainable food systems, this strengthens the case for embedding consumption-based emission monitoring and sustainability conditionality in the external dimension of the European Green Deal and the Farm to Fork Strategy.</p> 2026-09-29T22:01:32Z Dataset Dataset 10.3389/fsufs.2026.1923165.s001 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Data_Sheet_1_Economic_and_environmental_correlates_of_EU_food_trade_no_evidence_of_an_emission-oriented_sourcing_pattern_pdf/34027956 CC BY 4.0