been notified of <mark>10,366 regular and emergency SPS measures since January 1995 when the WTO was set up, with another 2,980 additions, alterations or corrections to existing notifications. The US submitted over a quarter of the total of regular notifications since 1995 (2,192), followed by Brazil (775), China (592) and Canada (567). Developing countries (including least-developed countries) now submit more notifications than developed countries. They broke through the 50% share in 2008 and now contribute about two thirds of notifications each year. Furthermore, the volume is rising. The latest update of the WTO Secretariat report says 2010 saw the largest number of notifications in a single year so far, at 1,436.</mark> Our study contributes to the literature in a number of aspects. First, we have created a time-series database of MRL import restrictiveness measures for 61 importing countries. To our best knowledge this is the first database of this type. Second, we introduce a measure of restrictiveness that takes into account all published MRLs for each importer-product pair in a given year. The closest measure in the existing literature is Li and Beghin (2012) which measure the deviation of MRLs for each importer-product-pesticide with respect to the CODEX standard. However, as shown in the next section, CODEX only regulates a limited number of productpesticides pairs compared to individual countries, thus Li and Beghin (2012) miss an important portion of the heterogeneity in regulations. Third, our analysis includes 66 products and close to 1,500 pesticides. This is in contrast to existing studies in the literature which analyze the effects of standards on one product, one pesticide, or one product-pesticide pair or at best, few selected products-pesticides pair.<sup>3</sup> Our results robustly show that product standards on average negatively affect exporters’ decisions to export to a given destination market. The evidence in this paper is consistent with the HMR model where firms face a fixed cost to export. Firms need to comply with importers’ standards which impose a fixed cost to firms that need to adjust their production processes in order to meet those foreign standards. Our results also show that the marginal effect of product standards in the BRICS (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) is greater in absolute terms than that of non-BRICS countries. Furthermore, we show that the value of exports from

> 3 Otsuki et al. (2001) measure the impact of the EU’s aflatoxin standards of cereals, dried fruits and nuts on imports from Africa. Wilson et al. (2003) used the gravity model to examine the impact of Tetracycline standard in beef. Sun et al. (2005) analyze Japan’s Chlorpyrifos standard on China’s vegetables export to Japan. Most recently, Chen et al. (2008) examines the impact of Chlorpyrifos MRLs standards on China’s export of vegetables and the impact of Oxytetracycline MRLs on aquatic products. More recently Xiong and Beghin (2012) re-estimate Otsuki et al. (2001) with ex post data. Winchester et al. (2012) developed bilateral deviations measures of food safety regulations for importer-exporter-product-pesticide groups but their data was highly aggregated and with no time series.

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