Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 June 2020
The objective of this article is to analyze the determinants of world wine exports in the first globalization, taking into account the principal exporting countries and using an extended version of the gravity model. The article distinguishes between ordinary- and high-quality wines. Our econometric results show that wine exports were not affected by the increase in the size of the markets of consuming countries, since in most of them wine was an alcoholic beverage consumed by a very small minority of the population. The harvests of the producing countries, particularly in preceding years, significantly and positively affected their exports. Conversely, the harvests of importers hurt exports as there was a home bias in consumption due to cultural, price, or tariff protection reasons. In the interwar period, the wine trade was severely affected by a series of shocks such as WWI, the Soviet revolution, the Prohibition, and the 1930s depression. As was the case with trade as a whole, the fall in transaction costs, favored exports, at least those of lower-priced and lower-quality wine. However, the liberalization of trade had a lesser impact on wine than on other products. (JEL Classifications: F14, N50, Q13, Q17)
This study has received financial support from Spain's Ministry of Science and Innovation, project PGC2018-095529-B-I00, Interreg-Sudoe project VINCI-SOE3/P2/F0917 (FEDER-European Union), the Government of Aragon, through the Research Groups “S55_20R AND S40_20R,” and from the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) “Building Europe from Aragon.” The authors thank Olivier Gergaud and the participants of the American Association of Wine Economics Conferences (Padua and Vienna) and the Prohibition 1919–2019 Conference (Reims) for their comments. We also thank the editors and an anonymous referee for their comments.