The competitiveness of the NAFTA countries members in the imports demand of Japanese meat market

Japan is one of the largest importers of meat products. The United States of America has provided a large proportion of these products during the last decade, but Canada and Mexico have steadily increased their share of these imports. NAFTA countries furnished a large proportion of these imports, namely, 60% of the swine meat and 40% of the bovine meat imported by Japan in 2016. In this article we apply a Source Differentiated Almost Ideal Demand System to estimate the pork and beef meat demands of Japan from the NAFTA countries during the 2006-2016 period. Both block separability and aggregation over product sources hypothesis were rejected at the conventional levels of significance. Hence, the data support differentiating by sources both individually and as a whole. Empirical results suggest that in order to increase their exports, all NAFTA countries must produce beef and swine more efficiently and be more competitive with the international market.