Consumers preferences and social sustainability: a discrete choice experiment on ‘Quality Agricultural Work’ ethical label in the Italian fruit sector

Eleonora Sofia Rossi, Luca Cacchiarelli (), Simone Severini and Alessandro Sorrentino
Additional contact information
Eleonora Sofia Rossi: University of Tuscia
Luca Cacchiarelli: University of Tuscia
Simone Severini: University of Tuscia
Alessandro Sorrentino: University of Tuscia

Agricultural and Food Economics, 2024, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-19

Abstract: Abstract The Italian legislator has adopted several instruments to discourage undeclared work and exploitative labour in agriculture, mostly of a penal-repressive nature. Among the direct and indirect policy measures, the ‘Quality Agricultural Work Network’ represents an interesting approach to producing a ‘whitelist’ of farmers compliant with labour regulations. A law proposal intends to establish the ‘Quality Agricultural Work’ (QAW) ethical label to incentivise farmers to join the network, to which a limited percentage of farms have signed up. This study aims to investigate consumer preferences for the QAW label in the Italian fruit sector. We conducted a choice experiment on a sample of 324 consumers. Willingness to pay for ethical labels was estimated before and after information treatment was administered to evaluate the prospective effects of promotional and information campaigns. The information treatment conveyed a clear and concise message about the QAW project and its ethical label. The results show that consumers would pay a high price premium for fruit produced under fair working conditions, indicating that there may be a market space for the QAW label. Moreover, consumers perceive environmental and social sustainability claims as complementary contexts where both dimensions of sustainability are relevant. Graphical abstract

Keywords: Agricultural labour; Fair working conditions; Quality Agricultural Work Network; Ethical consumption; Social sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 J43 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1186/s40100-024-00307-9 Abstract (text/html)

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:spr:agfoec:v:12:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1186_s40100-024-00307-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nomics/journal/40100

DOI: 10.1186/s40100-024-00307-9

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural and Food Economics is currently edited by Alessandro Banterle, Liesbeth Dries, Andrea Marchini and Carlo Russo

More articles in Agricultural and Food Economics from Springer, Italian Society of Agricultural Economics (SIDEA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().