Food Safety Issues

This paper wants to analyze food safety regulation theoretically. The outline of this paper is, firstly to explore the supply and demand of food safety and their roles for food safety in a simple market framework, secondly examine the market failure issue in food safety market according its market performance, and thirdly, deeply research the food safety regulation by regulators, which may correct market failure.We introduced why we should research food safety issue and what roles economists can play. After this, we reviewed present foreign and domestic literature on food safety along two outlines, which is product quality and food safety that can be used to analyze food safety issue.We used a simple market supply-demand model to analyze food safety market, which is the food market that differentiated by safety attribute, and to find what factors can restrict food safety market achieve the Parato Optima. We examined the firms' vertical integration behavior and its effects to food safety supply and consumers' willingness to pay and its roles to food safety demand.We continually argued the standard to judge market failure and the issue of food safety market failure. Based this, we introduced food safety regulation. We went inside of food safety regulation institutes and found the different effects for different regulator governance structure to food safety market performance. Also we talked about China's food safety regulation reform on its present situation analysis and the third-party regulation, which may correct regulation failure.This paper innovates on food safety regulation from industrial and regulation economics perspectives. We argue that food safety issue firstly is a market problem and then is a regulation problem, and our key to deal with this issue is to understand the powers changes among market (firms), government and non-government organization (NGO).