Does Government Intervention Ensure Food Safety? Evidence from China

Hongfeng Zhang,Lu Huang,Chengyun Sun,Hongyun Si

doi:10.3390/ijerph18073645

Abstract

Food safety is related to public health, social welfare, and human survival, all of which are important and pressing areas of concern all over the world. The government plays an increasingly important role in the supervision of food safety. The role of the government, however, is also controversial. Using provincial panel data of China from 2005 to 2015, the present study intends to shed light on the associations between government intervention and food safety performance under two scenarios of local government—competition and noncompetition. This will be accomplished through an exploratory spatial data analysis and a spatial econometric model. The results reveal negative associations between food safety performance and government intervention without considering local government competition. As was also observed, government intervention not only inhibits the improvement of food safety in the region, but also has a negative spatial spillover effect on food safety in neighboring provinces. This is the result after considering government competition, thus, showing the competitive strategic interaction of the “race to the bottom”. Further analysis reveals that, if geographically similar regions are selected as reference objects, the food safety performance of each province will have a stronger tendency to compete for the better. If regions with similar economic development levels are selected as reference objects, food safety performance will have a stronger tendency to compete for the worse. This work provides new evidence for the relationships between government intervention and food safety, and, also, proposes some insightful implications for policymakers for governing food safety.

Highlights

In the past few years, global food incidents have occurred frequently [1,2], and the problem of food waste is serious [3]
The influence coefficient of government intervention on FSP is negative and significant at the level of 1%. This indicates that there is a negative association between government intervention and food safety performance
This study finds that government intervention in China is negatively associated with food safety performance, which is contrary to the research conclusions of Lv et al, Wang et al, and Duan et al, all of which find that government intervention has a positive influence on other industries [42,43,44]

Summary

Introduction

In the past few years, global food incidents have occurred frequently [1,2], and the problem of food waste is serious [3]. These issues have aroused widespread concern all over the world. Food incidents in various countries have shaken consumer confidence in food safety; the acceleration of economic globalization has made the food supply chain more complicated [4]. In 2019, China ranked 35th out of 113 countries in food security, according to the Global Food Security Index (GFSI) [5], and there is still much room for improvement.

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion