The Effect Evaluation Of Food Safety Regulation And Reconstruction Of Their Regulotary System In China

Food safety which is related to people’s livelihood is the foundation to guarantee the life, health and life quality of human being. It is not just a technical issue to ensure the quality and safety of food by food safety regulation, but even an important social and economic subject. With the improvement of agricultural production capacity and economic development level, food security is not the only concern of most countries any more, and the food safety problem which aims to elevate the level of food quality and safety is getting more attention from governmental decision makers and general public. In recent years, the food safety incidents have occurred frequently in China. The problem of food safety even causes severe economic and social consequence, and constraints the sustainable economic development. To strengthen the food safety regulation, change the current situation of food safety and control the accidents has been the urgent need of consumers and the key assignment of government. The Third Plenary Session of the eighteen cleared that "To improve food and drug safety regulatory agencies to be a unified authority, establishing the most stringent regulatory system to cover the whole process of food production and processing, establishing the traceability system of the origin food and quality labeling system to ensure food and drug safety.’The food safety problems arise from information asymmetry. The consumers can not acquire all the qualities of food because of the experience qualities and credence qualities of food before purchase, and even can’t make sure the nutritional ingredient and safety level of food after buying. Besides, considering most foodborne diseases are chronic, the incurrence of disease can not be attributed to taking that food certainly. Accordingly, the credence qualities of food are the origin of informational asymmetry in the food trading. The food production and processing enterprises can sell seconds at best quality prices and reduce the cost by selling fake and unsafe commodities, because they have information advantages over consumers. And that actually endangers the health and life safety of consumers. This explains the necessity of governmental intervation on food safety issues, supervision for corporate behaviors, forcing the film to reveal information about food and pass the quality and safety certification system, and punishing the act in violation of regulations. However, there are also many defects even in food safety itself. We call that government failure. It has been an academic consensus that there are multi-sectional regulation and overlapping responsibilities problems so called "multiple management" in the food safety regulation system in our country. Actually, the food safety regulation system in China has been in continuous development and improvement process. The reform of food safety regulation system in China has been through the system led by state health department transitioned to multi-sectional regulation, and gradually formed the new system in the context of "large system" reform. The government and regulatory agencies has made a few important and beneficial reform of food safety regulation. From March2013, China Food and Drug Administration which is newly constructed integrated the functions and agencies that were decentralized among department of health, agriculture, quality supervision, industrial and commercial. That concentrates the regulation bodies, and integrates the resources.The reform of large system is still in the beginning, so the effectiveness will appear gradually in a long period of time. Although government has been strengthening food safety regulation continuously, the food safety incidents still emerged in an endless stream because the serious information asymmetry problem can not be fixed efficiently in food market. As far as it goes, it still has a profound significance to find deficiencies and problems in food safety regulation by effect evaluation, propose the path of improving the effect of regulation and demonstrate the validity of large system reform, then put forward food safety governance involves enterprises, consumers and social associations as an institutional supplement and insurance.Therefore, this thesis starts with the depiction and analysis of the course of food safety regulation reform in China to explore the problems existing in food safety regulation system, and then assesses the current situation of food safety in our country, shows the strengthening trend of food safety regulation during recent years by descriptive statistics and constructing an overall index.After that, we evaluate the effect of food safety regulation in China from enterprise and consumer perspective separately. By DEA method, we assess the input-output efficiency of food safety regulation from enterprise perspective, and find out that the effect of food safety regulation is not idealistic. And then we take Shandong for an example to investigate some regulatory effect index of enterprises that adopt HACCP including the state of operation, the degree of product quality, and consumers’satisfaction. We also come to a conclusion that the effect of food safety regulation needs to be further improved.From the consumers perspective, we empirically analyses the effect of food safety regulation on food consumption, the nutritional level and the health condition of consumers as the indirect effect of food safety regulation using difference in differences and propensity score matching method with CHNS database. The results show that:the consumer has restored the confidence on diary product. The food safety regulation has improved the growth of diary product consumption, and it also ameliorated the nutritional level and the health status of consumers. But in general, the promotion is not so significant and ideal.The empirical analysis shows that the effect of food safety regulation is not significant. This thesis suggests that one of the internal causes of this phenomenon is the complexity of food safety system, especially the distribution of power. The food industry confronts with multiple principal-agent problems. There are multi-level principal-agent relationships among government (regulatory agencies), enterprises, legislature and moral risk in the sessions of regulation. The principal-agent chain is so long to reduce the efficiency of regulation. The regulatory agency as the intermediate links of this principal-agent chain is the key of the whole food safety regulation. The mode of power allocation affects the final effect of regulation.Based on the characteristic of food safety regulation system in China, this paper analyses the situation of regulatory agencies as principal and agent respectively. When the regulatory agencies are considered as agent, this paper discusses the necessity of large system reform by constructing a multi-task principal-agent model, and points out that it it’s a better choice to integrate the regulatory agencies. When the regulatory agencies are considered as principal, this paper analyses the probable regulatory capture, and proposes the direction of further reformation. Besides, we also consider the possibility of the cooperation of consumers and government.Food safety regulation involves many stakeholder including the government, enterprise and consumers. So the behavior of regulator is not the only issue that decides the effect of regulation. This thesis analyses the behavior, optimal strategy choice and the influencing factors of every stakeholder by constructing several game models. So we find out the importance of strengthening government supervision and control and corporate social responsibility. The consumers and social associations can play a role in food safety governance too.Based on the analysis above, this thesis recommends that it is a better choice to expand the conventional government-leading food safety regulation to food safety governance led by multiple subjects. In the pattern of pluralistic society, the conventional food safety governance structure is facing many difficulties, and can not meet the need of modern society. Eventually this paper makes a point to construct a food safety cooperative governance frame with regulator dominating, producer self-discipline, consumers involving and society cooperating, as the final institutional assurance to improve the effect of food safety regulation.