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The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the impacts that the recent proliferation of private and overlapping standards is having in the trade of agricultural products from developing countries.

In a first stage industry experts in the Chilean fresh fruit trading industry were interviewed to understand the perceived impact that private standards are imposing in the industry. These interviews allowed to identify the market case study, table grapes, the landscape of private standards and their prevalence in different countries. In a second stage, a gravity trade model for trade in table grapes was estimated, with a focus on the more stringent countries identified by experts in the first stage.

We show evidence that the proliferation of private standards required by large European retailers has diverted trade away from more stringent countries that require more certifications (and into less stringent European markets). We also show that the costs of these additional certifications have been shared by trading partners, via an increase in direct sales, as opposed to consignment (the traditional marketing mode), which is associated with higher prices.

The impacts of the recent proliferation of private and overlapping standards in international trade needs to be better understood both by the legal and economic literature. While the use of private standards has been growing since the 1990s, there is a recent trend of large European retailers imposing their own and overlapping standards that needs to be better understood to inform policy.

While there is a thin literature on the impact of private standards on trade, most of this has studied the effects of the now de facto mandatory GlobalGAP certification. However, there is a recent trend by large European retailers of demanding their own private certifications, together with other already existing overlapping private standards. This study describes and analyzes the impacts of this rather new trend.

This chapter provides a legal and theoretical overview of environmental PPMs articulated in private standards. It seeks to expand the debate about environmental PPMs, elucidating important dimensions to the issue from the perspective of global governance and international trade law. One of the arguments advanced in this chapter is that a comprehensive analysis of environmental PPMs should consider not only their role in what is regarded as trade barriers (governmental and market driven) but also their significance in global objectives such as the transition towards a green economy and sustainable patterns of consumption and production.

This chapter is based on an extensive literature review and doctrinal legal research.

This research shows that environmental PPMs represent a key issue in the context of the trade and environment relationship. For decades such measures have been thought of as being trade distortive and thus incompatible with WTO law. Although it seems clear now that they are not unlawful per se, their legal status remains unsettled. PPMs can be regarded as regulatory choices associated with a wide range of environmental concerns. However, in trade disputes, challenged measures involving policy objectives addressing production issues in the conservation of natural resources tend to focus on fishing/harvesting techniques. On the other hand, an important goal of Global Environmental Governance (GEG) is to incentivise sustainable consumption and production in order to achieve the transition to a green economy. In this sense, it can be argued that what are generally denominated as ‘PPMs’ in the WTO terminology can alternatively be regarded ‘SCPs’ in the language of environmental governance. Environmental PPMs are not only limited to state-based measures, such as import bans, tariff preferences, and governmental labelling schemes. Environmental PPMs may also amount to good corporate practices towards environmental protection and provide the rationale for numerous private environmental standards.

Most academic attention afforded to environmental-PPMs has focused on their impacts on trade or their legality under WTO law. Although legal scholars have already referred to the significance of such measures in the context of environmental governance, this issue has remained almost entirely unexplored. This chapter seeks to fill the gap in the literature in this regard. In particular, it addresses the relevance of environmental PPMs in the context of decentralised governance initiatives such as the UN Global Compact and private environmental standards.

Overall, this chapter assists in the understanding of the significance of environmental PPMs in the context of private environmental standards and other governance initiatives involving goals related to sustainable consumption and production. This chapter adds to the existing body of literature on the subject of PPMs in international trade and environmental governance.

Private standards are increasingly governing international food trade, but little is known about the implications for developing countries. The objective of the study is to provide evidence in the ongoing debate on standards as barrier or catalyst for developing countries’ export. We use the Peruvian fresh asparagus export sector as a case study and provide empirical panel data evidence on the effects of certification to private food standards on export volumes of firms. Our dataset on the transactions of 567 export firms from 1993 to 2011 allows us to take export dynamics and time trends into account, as well as to keep country and sector specific effects constant. In our empirical strategy, we first use simple OLS and ignore firm-specific unobservable effects and dynamic export patterns. We then account for export persistence, as well as company fixed effects and finally, use System-GMM estimators to address potential reversed causality issues. These approaches represent substantial methodological improvements compared with previous studies on the trade effects of private standards. The empirical innovation is crucial for accurate impact estimation, as results indicate that certification to standards has a positive effect on the export volumes of companies, but that the significant effect dwindles as soon as unobserved firm heterogeneity and export persistency are properly controlled for. Additional studies with large data availabilities are needed to further disentangle the effect and confirm the case study results.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) have issued significantly different accounting and financial reporting standards for contributions. These standards are particularly significant for reporting by private and public institutions of higher education. This paper summarizes many of these differences including timing of revenue recognition, classification of contributed resources, recording pledges, and recognition of “collections.” A framework is suggested for evaluating accounting and financial reporting standards for contributions. Finally, recommendations are made to both FASB and GASB for changes to make their standards more consistent.

The aim of this article was to present a retrospective assessment of the intellectual structure of private agricultural and food standards research in global trade. This study was motivated by the increasing role of standards and certifications in governing global agricultural and food trade.

The current investigation was carried out with bibliometric methods using VOSviewer software. Techniques such as citation, co-citation, keyword co-occurrence, keyword evolution and co-authorship analyses were performed to tackle the research questions. Articles were extracted from Scopus database for the period 1998–2022 (30th August 2022) with selected keywords (“Private food standard*” OR “food standard*” OR “agri-food standard*” AND “agri*” OR “agro*” OR “farm*” OR “food*” AND “international trade” OR “global trade” OR “international business”) along certain filters (subject – Economics and Business management: language – English: Document – article and review articles and source – journals).

The results show that the intellectual structure of private agricultural and food standards research in global trade has evolved around five clusters, namely: (1) the political economy of food standards, (2) food standards and their challenges in global trade, (3) food standards and integration into value chains, (4) food standards and market access and (5) food standards and exports from developing countries. However, the authors found the research gaps in each of the thematic clusters.

The main limitation of this study is that the authors focused their attention on certain aspects of bibliometric review, such as the intellectual structure of the field, the citation analysis and the collaboration network. Future research could attempt to explore new field development through bibliographic coupling and deepening of conceptual structure using content analysis by incorporating the research methods used in the respective studies.

The emerging research areas in private agricultural and food standards in global trade are related to topics on food quality, sustainable development, genetically modified organisms, World Trade Organization, tariff structure, trade agreements, food industry and European Union. However, there is less research and little collaboration between Africa and developed countries. For example, Africa's total publications were (15), while the US had (46), China (15), Belgium (23), Germany (27), Italy (32) and the UK (24).

There are limited studies that have conducted a retrospective evaluation of the intellectual structure of private agricultural and food standards research in the global trade using bibliometric analysis. The present investigation is novel in identifying the thematic research clusters, emerging issues and future research directions. This is more important to developing countries as their agricultural produce face challenges to access markets of the developed world.

This study aims to investigate the impact of social risk and inter-tier brand competition across traditional retailers and discounters on consumers' purchase intentions in the UK.

The authors conduct a 2 (social risk) × 3 (brand type) × 2 (retailer type) between-subjects design (n = 309; UK) experiment employing a Qualtrics online panel in the UK.

The study shows that while premium private labels (PPLs) are on par with national brands, discounter's PPLs outperform mainstream retailer's PPLs. Furthermore, consumers appear to purchase standard private labels and PPLs for themselves when shopping at a discounter but turn to national brands when shopping for socially risky situations.

While Tesco's premium (Tesco Finest*) and standard private label (Tesco Everyday Value) explicitly make reference to the retailer's name, for Lidl's premium (Deluxe) and standard private label (e.g. Milbona), the discounter's name is not visible. This is something this study did not control for.

Given that Lidl has opened its first US store in 2017 with ambitious expansion plans, our findings provide in particular practical guidelines for how to promote PPLs in countries where the discounter landscape is less saturated than in Germany.

This study provides insights into the understanding of the influence of social risk on purchasing intentions of premium private labels vs standard private labels vs national brands offered by mainstream retailers or discounters in the UK.

The need for food safety and food quality standards is acknowledged by public regulators, private actors, and the society. The purpose of this paper is to identify the types of actors in the multilevel transnational food chain regulatory governance and how their interlinking affects regulatory outcomes over time.

Food chain regulatory standards emerge within a complex process beyond the state. Based on interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives, namely regulatory governance and political economy, this paper provides a integrative framework of analysis by identifying the types of actors and their interactions in the food chain regulatory governance.

Food chain regulatory standards setting have been mainly studied either from the public regulator or the firm self-regulating point of view. This paper demonstrates how the political and economics dynamics of the interactions among public and private actors operate within the transnational food standards setting process. The study identifies the groups of interdependent actors (public and private) that interact within the transnational food chain regulatory process and develop public-private regulations, self-regulations, and co-regulations over time. In this process, the actors’ different power, operational and regulatory capacity, experience, resources affect the regulatory outcome with socio-economic and governance implications.

The paper does not examine in detail how these interactions operate empirically on specific regulations.

The paper offers an integrative thorough understanding of the food chain regulatory standard setting process, relevant for academics, policy makers, the industry, and society.

The paper constitutes new research by identifying the actors and interactions in the integrative regulatory governance of the food chain standards.

The aim of this paper is to assess the welfare effects of the newest trends in food safety policies characterised by the shift from public to private intervention.

Food safety policies are analysed through concepts of new economic sociology, with a critical review of the literature on social capital.

The article shows that as food safety and quality attributes responsible for the exchange complexity are simply codified and enforced through standards and third‐party certification, the global value chain governance shifts from a relational type to a power‐based type, with possible negative welfare effects.

Further research would be required to verify the welfare effects suggested on the theoretical ground.

The article makes a useful updating of food safety policies and organisational innovation in the food system.

The paper introduces some new (with respect to the marketing literature related to the food system) concepts and theories of economic sociology.

This paper seeks to provide an overview and context for the emerging field of public policies for scaling voluntary standards, or private regulations, on the social and environmental performance of business and finance, to promote sustainable development; in order to stimulate more innovation and research in this field.

The paper takes the approach of a literature review of texts from intergovernmental and non‐governmental organisations, to develop a synthesis of issues, before literature review from management studies, development studies and international relations, to revise the synthesis and identify policy relevant future research.

Governance at all levels but particularly the international level involves corporations and their stakeholders. Together they have created non‐statutory corporate social responsibility (CSR) standards which now influence significant amounts of international trade and investment, thereby presenting new benefits, risks and challenges for sustainable development. Governments around the world are now innovating public policies on these standards, which can be categorised to inform policy development: governments prepare, prefer, promote and prescribe CSR standards. Therefore, a new dimension to collaborative governance is emerging and would benefit from research and technical assistance. As concepts and practices of regulation and governance are moving beyond state versus non‐state, mandatory versus voluntary approaches, so issues about transparency, accountability and democratic participation remain important for any new manifestation of regulation or governance.

By contextualising public policy innovations on CSR standards within new theories of governance, including “private regulation” and “collaborative governance”, the paper helps to clarify a new agenda for policy making and related research.