Vietnamese rice exports: Do large destination markets stimulate?

What determines Vietnamese rice export flows? Data on rice export from Vietnam and its 124 destination markets in 2010 shows that high-income from agricultural sector of importing countries do not necessarily result in higher rice exports whereas exports tend to be higher to highly populated countries. In order to confirm the negative effect of the importing countries' GDP, We proceed to split the full sample into subsamples for Asian and non-Asian importing countries. While GDP covers the entire income of the whole economy, the value added agriculture performs better in determining the export pattern of firms operating in one sector. Specifically, distance in some cases encourages rice exports if destination markets are non-Asian countries implying a high export capacity of rice firms. For a heavy bulk good such as rice, the effect of landlocked dummy is far more sensitive to rice exports volume than exports value.