Last updated on December 15, 2013
That’s the title of a nice new article in World Development by Henrik Hansen and Neda Trifkovic, both from the University of Copenhagen. Click here for an ungated version.
Here is the abstract:
We estimate the causal effect of food standards on Vietnamese pangasius farmers’ well-being measured by per capita consumption expenditure. We estimate both the average effects and the local average treatment effects on poorer and richer farmers by instrumental variable quantile regression. Our results indicate that large returns can be accrued from food standards, but only for the upper middle-class farmers, i.e., those between the 50% and 85% quantiles of the expenditure distribution. Overall, our result points to an exclusionary impact of standards for the poorest farmers while the richest do not apply standards because the added gain is too small.
The emphasis is mine. If you are like me, your first inclination (after pausing to appreciate the fact that the authors identify a causal effect) was to look up “pangasius” on Wikipedia; here is the entry.
I should note that by “food standards,” what the authors mean here is both quality and safety standards, which are often requested by importing countries. See here for related work of my own, in which I look at the impact of enforcement in the context of contract farming whose output is exported.
As an added bonus, Neda Trifkovic is on Twitter. You can follow her here if you have an interest in food policy in developing countries.