Supply Mode Of Food Quality And Security Information

With China ranking to the world's second largest economy,people's living standards has enhanced significantly with a striking feature that demand in quantity of food consumption is basically met.However,food safety and security over the past few years fully articulates that the safety is more of a concern than its quantity.Therefore,what's urgent to our government is to reassure our consumers in food consumption.On this count,this paper finds that the course of food safety and security is supply and demand information asymmetry on food quality.Based on Spence signaling theory,we discuss food enterprises' and their consumers' decision behavior and market response to deliver obstacles of quality information on food,and relevant government performance on regulation of food market.To address such asymmetry,we focus on relations between the government and market.Based on government regulating theory,property rights theory and principle-agent theory,we elucidate that the government has congenital defects in quality information disclosure on macro level,and that goods with public attribute may also fail to transmit quality information on micro level,thereby we suggest that the supply on quality information from either part cannot satisfy consumer demand.It thus leads to an inevitable outcome of food market failure.By introducing public choice theory,transaction cost theory and Buchanan club theory,we infer the possibility that the government and market could complement each other by joining hands on food quality information disclosure.On market level,third party certification,as an important public regulator,can not only serve government regulation system but also meet discrepant consumer demand for food quality.According to Spence signaling theory,the third party obtains quality information from food enterprises and provides consumers with intuitive food certification based on such information with reputation as collateral and medium.It enables consumers to select food according to their preferences on food quality.To illustrate the point,we elaborate how the third party certification plays a medium role of transforming and transmitting information between food enterprises and consumers by presenting a case study of China Quality Mark Certification Group(CQM).Furthermore,we also collect first-hand information through questionnaire on the Internet.Within limited sample capacity,we find the consumer's cognition and trust degree on third party certification and their contributory factors.Combining theory and practical cases,we suggest that the government and third party certification has symbiotic and complementary on food quality information supply.