Which economic tools for quality regulation? Markets and regulations in the agrifood industry

Stéphan Marette ()

INRAE Sciences Sociales, 2009, vol. 2009, 5

Abstract: Faced with the issues of obesity and malnutrition, sanitary crises, the presence of chemical residue in food, issues surrounding market authorizations for genetically modified organisms or meat from cloned animals and so on, the Public Authorities must often intervene to guarantee the transparency of information toward consumers and a satisfactory quality level. However, the impacts of such interventions are not simple and require painstaking research. For example, when the information to consumers is imperfect, the introduction of a minimum quality standard may lead to a reduction in competition. Conversely, by sharing its advertising cost between producers, a collective information policy such as generic advertising counteracts the reduction in competition inherent in advertising, quality or safety expenditure. Furthermore, from an analysis of consumer behaviour faced with the risks (methyl-mercury) and benefits (omega-3) of fish consumption, we show that a taxation/subsidy policy is more efficient than the information policies most often implemented in such a case. A judicious choice between the tax levels applied to the species with toxic product and the subsidy levels to the healthiest species may even result in market regulation with a balanced public budget.

Keywords: Agribusiness; Agricultural and Food Policy; Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/153337/files/iss09-1_eng.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:inrass:153337

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.153337

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in INRAE Sciences Sociales from Institut national de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement (INRAE), Departement Sciences Sociales, Agriculture et Alimentation, Espace et Environnement (SAE2) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().