Maddalena Ragona

Food safety regulation, economic impact assessment and quantitative methods

Together with a call for more efficient regulations in the EU, there is a growing demand for transparency in the evaluation techniques to assess and predict their effects. This article explores the potential impacts of food safety regulations and discusses the quantitative methods used in the policy evaluation literature. Along with the strengths and limitations of each method, this review highlights other transversal issues relevant to the assessment strategies. Among these are the imbalance between ex ante and ex post evaluation, the lack of adequate data, the difficulty of estimating the dynamic effects of regulations, and the possibility of endogenous relationships.