by Chen-Ti Chen, John M. Crespi, and Yongjie Ji
With a new administration considering tariffs, it is important to examine the current state of the United States’ export position. CARD recently published a policy brief titled “Waging a Global Trade War Alone: The Cost of Blanket Tariffs on Friend and Foe” (Balistreri and McDaniel 2024). In 2021, CARD developed an online tool and published an accompanying article (Chen, Crespi, and Ji 2021) that examined the United States’ relative trade strength.
In this update to the Chen et al. (2021) APR article we alert readers to the updated online tool as well. The new tool extends the data set that calculates the normalized revealed comparative advantage (NRCA) index developed by Yu et al. (2009), to examine the United States’ trade position over the years 1980 to 2023 in beef, pork, corn, soybeans, and wheat. The NRCA is a measure of the competitiveness of export markets.
As discussed in our earlier APR article, competition is sometimes difficult to see when only looking at trade flows over time. The NRCA allows us to see whether the increasing total US export values in these commodities masks any underlying slippage in a measure of competitiveness called “comparative advantage.” To say that a country has a comparative advantage in the production of a good is not to say that they are the best at producing that good. Rather, comparative advantage means that a country is better at producing that good in terms of its opportunity cost of producing something else (see Balistreri 2019 for a more detailed discussion). Economists use comparative advantage in trade as a way of measuring how competitive a country is because it takes into account other things that a nation, and its rivals, could produce.
In the figures presented in this article, there are two sets of graphs for each commodity for the six main exporters of that commodity (based on current export shares on the world market). The graph on the left side of each figure shows the export values for the commodities in a traditional fashion. The graph on the right side of each figure presents the NRCA measure of comparative advantage or, competitiveness. An NRCA value of zero means that a nation has neither a comparative advantage nor a comparative disadvantage. If all nations are more or less around zero, it means the market is very competitive with no nation having a distinct advantage. On the other hand, negative values do indicate a competitive disadvantage and positive values indicate a nation’s competitive advantage relative to its trading rivals. NRCA comparisons allow us to say a country with a higher NRCA has a stronger competitive position for that commodity. Trade data can be difficult to measure especially in the case of meats because the aggregations used can differ among the various reports. For consistency, we chose to use data based upon total market value measured in US dollars from the United Nations’ Comtrade database (DESA/UNSD 2021).1 Choosing to use value instead of quantities makes the ranking of national exports a function of exchange rates. Further, for beef and pork, our data do not include exports of live animals. The nations we rank as the top six, thus, may differ from those reported in other trade databases that look at quantity of exports or include other data in their commodity export aggregation such as the USDA/FAS database.
Figures 1 and 2 present export values and NRCA indices from the top exporters of beef and pork, which show steady growth in export values since the 1980s. By 2018, the United States had become the leader in export value in both beef and pork; however, by 2020 this was no longer the case. By comparison, the graphs on the right side of figures 1 and 2 show the NRCA indices declining for the United States (the steep drop in NRCA in BEEF around 2003–2004 was due to a mad cow disease event). The United States is not as competitive in either pork or beef as it used to be, with Spain becoming more competitive in pork, and Australia and Brazil becoming more competitive in the beef trade.
Likewise, figures 3, 4, and 5 show corn, soybean, and wheat export values and their related NRCA indices. For decades, the United States was the dominant supplier in these crops but lost the top spot in soybeans to Brazil around 2017 and in corn the United States dropped to the same level as Brazil in 2023. For wheat, Australia, Canada, and Russia export about the same today as the United States. In terms of comparative advantages only in soybeans do the Untied States and Brazil have significant comparative advantages relative to other exporters and between the United States and Brazil, Brazil has expanded its comparative advantage.
What is clear is that the United States, although a major player in the commodities examined here, has significantly lost the competitive advantage it once had in wheat, corn, and soybeans. In soybeans, the United States still has some advantage, but Brazil appears to be the nation with the clearest competitive advantage in that market. Where the United States used to lag behind in terms of competitiveness in pork and beef, it has become more competitive with other trading nations, which is good. Nonetheless, that competition is now fierce and Spain has emerged with a slight comparative advantage in pork exports.
What we find over time is that there is a weaving together of the NRCA indices from a situation where some countries had competitive advantages in the 1980s and 1990s to the condition by 2023 where so many of these markets indicate that no nation is really in a position to demonstrate dominance. The markets have gotten more and more competitive. For buyers of these commodities, this is good. More competition benefits consumers. On the other hand, tariffs and retaliatory tariffs in these markets would be of little benefit to any country or consumers because an exporter can more easily find another buyer today than it could in 1980. To quote Hart from this issue of Agricultural Policy Review, “While domestic usage for all of the commodities is still quite strong, the gains in usage over the past year have mainly come from exports. The potential for tariffs reducing or eliminating that growth is large" (Hart 2025).
You can also find these comparative advantages demonstrated in the updated animation tool on the CARD web page (see figure 6). With this tool, you can choose any of the five commodities and look at the comparative advantage as measured by the commodity export share relative to a nation’s export share. This method of presenting the NRCA allows viewers to focus on changes in both relative competitive position and size of exports. Figure 6 is a screen shot from the tool that shows the relative competitive positions of the world’s six major beef exporters in 2023. In the visualization, the larger a nation’s circle the larger its export value, the higher the circle the larger its share of total beef exports, the closer the circle to the diagonal line the lower its comparative advantage.
Footnotes
[1] The commodity classification codes used are: Beef (SITC Rev.1 0111); Corn (SITC Rev.1 0440); Pork (SITC Rev.1 0113); Soybeans (SITC Rev.1 2214); Wheat (SITC Rev.1 0410).
References
Balistreri, E.J. 2019. "International Trade Policy: Insights from a General-equilibrium Approach." Agricultural Policy Review, Winter 2019. Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, Iowa State University. https://agpolicyreview.card.iastate.edu/winter-2019/international-trade-policy-insights-general-equilibrium-approach.
Balistreri, E.J., and C. McDaniel. 2024. "Waging a Global Trade War Alone: The Cost of Blanket Tariffs on Friend and Foe." Policy brief 24-PB 44. Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, Iowa State University. Available at https://www.card.iastate.edu/products/publications/synopsis/?p=1395.
Chen, C.-T., J.M. Crespi, W. Hahn, L.L. Schulz, and F. Taha. 2020. "Long-Run Impacts of Trade Shocks and Export Competitiveness: Evidence from the U.S. BSE Event." Agricultural Economics 51(2020):941–957.
Chen, C.-T., J.M. Crespi, and Y. Ji. 2021. "The United States’ Competitive Positions in Beef, Corn, Pork, Soy, and Wheat Exports: 1980–2019." Agricultural Policy Review, Winter 2021. Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, Iowa State University. https://agpolicyreview.card.iastate.edu/winter-2021/united-states-competitive-positions-beef-corn-pork-soy-and-wheat-exports-1980-2019.
Hart, C. 2025. "USDA Outlook for 2025." Agricultural Policy Review, Winter 2025. https://agpolicyreview.card.iastate.edu/usdas-outlook-2025.
United Nations Comtrade Database (DESA/UNSD). 2021. http://comtrade.un.org. Accessed March 4, 2021.
Yu, R., J. Cai, and P. Leung. 2009. "The Normalized Revealed Comparative Advantage Index." The Annals of Regional Science 43(1):267–282.
Suggested citation
Chen, C.-T., J.M. Crespi, and Y. Ji. 2025. "The United States’ Competitive Positions in Beef, Corn, Pork, Soy, and Wheat Exports: 1980–2023." Agricultural Policy Review, Winter 2025. Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, Iowa State University. https://agpolicyreview.card.iastate.edu/united-states-competitive-positions-beef-corn-pork-soy-and-wheat-exports-1980-2023.