Abstract
The European Union (EU) is the world’s largest market for fishery and aquaculture products (FAPs) in nominal terms. Given the importance of these products, EU authorities and policy-makers are continuously monitoring consumer preferences and attitudes, analysing whether or not the implementation of EU policies and regulations improves the market conditions. For example, the Eurobarometer (European Union, 2018a) surveyed 27,732 EU residents including a specific module to analyse the fishery and aquaculture EU market. In this study, the dataset is used to estimate Ordered Probit models using effects coding and their marginal effects to identify the main determinants of the frequency of FAPs at-home consumption. Results indicate that the highest probability to consume more frequently FAPs is related to considering that one of the main reasons for buying or eating fishery and aquaculture products is because they are healthy, while the highest probability to consume less frequently FAPs is related to consumers who do not understand at all the information accompanying the products. Similarly, other important reasons for consuming FAPs more frequently are their good taste and low relative price. Also, results indicate a higher frequency of consumption of FAPs for those consumers who are over 55 years of age, are wealthy, have a wild product preference, live in a household of 3 persons or more and are very satisfied with their lives. To our best knowledge, there is not a similar approach in the current literature that considers such an extensive sample which is representative of all the countries that conform the EU28. Results provide valuable information especially for producers and authorities in terms of marketing and policy analysis.
Highlights
The European Union (EU) is the world’s largest trader of fishery and aquaculture products (FAPs) in nominal terms reaching around EUR 30.3 billion in 2017 and surpassing second-ranked China by more than EUR 2.3 billion (FAO, 2018)
The heteroscedastic model permits that the variance of the error term varies by allowing the standard deviation to be determined according to the following equation: σ = exp(δZi), where Zi is a vector of variables that explain the level of variance and δ is a vector of parameters to be estimated
A homoscedastic Ordered Probit model was estimated using effects coding for all the categorical variables included in the model
Summary
The EU is the world’s largest trader of fishery and aquaculture products (FAPs) in nominal terms reaching around EUR 30.3 billion in 2017 and surpassing second-ranked China by more than EUR 2.3 billion (FAO, 2018). These high figures are a consequence of the importance of FAPs for the human diet, accounting for around 17% of the intake of animal protein for the global population (FAO, 2018), and more spe cifically, because of the many benefits offered by the consumption of these products. The CMO is currently regulated by the 1379/2013 EU regulation, which amongst other things, establishes the mandatory labelling information for FAPs (D’Amico et al, 2016) and a list of the voluntary information that can be added to FAPs, such as information related to the environmental, ethical or social aspects of the products, production techniques and practices, and others (European Parliament, 2013)
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