Do producers respond to quality information disclosure? The HACCP certification in meat industry
China Agricultural Economic Review
ISSN: 1756-137X
Article publication date: 25 February 2021
Issue publication date: 17 January 2022
Abstract
Purpose
Food markets are characterized by asymmetric information between suppliers and consumers, which causes inefficiency of market and food safety risks. This paper studies how the food quality and safety information disclosed by the government affects the hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP) certification decision of meat producers. The heterogeneity of the effects across different regions, provinces with different meat output scales and provinces with different intensities of food safety regulation is evaluated.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper applies a unique database comprising information from multiple sources. Food quality and safety information disclosure is indicated by the number of failure records of food sampling inspections by the government in 2015–2018. Fixed-effect model is used in the analyses.
Findings
The results demonstrate that food quality and safety information disclosure has a significant effect on the HACCP certification adoption by meat producers. The effect is heterogeneous across geographic regions, i.e. this effect is larger in the east and the middle of China than that in the west and the northeast. The heterogeneity across regions may be caused by the variance in meat output scales and fiscal expenditures on food safety among provinces.
Originality/value
This research is one of the preliminary attempts to understand how producers respond in terms of HACCP certification to the amount of food quality and safety information disclosed by the government, based on the case of meat industry in China.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The work was funded by the National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science of China (grant no. 19ZDA106), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 71773109), the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang (grant no. LY19G030030) and the ZJU-IFPRI Center for International Development Studies.Declarations of interest: none.
Citation
Zhou, J., Jin, Y., Wang, Y. and Liang, Q. (2022), "Do producers respond to quality information disclosure? The HACCP certification in meat industry", China Agricultural Economic Review, Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 47-63. https://doi.org/10.1108/CAER-06-2020-0156
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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