Do EU Member States apply food standards uniformly? A look at fruit and vegetable safety notifications

Abstract:

The hypothesis that six EU Member States show a common behaviour on the implementation of food safety standards on fruit and vegetables imports is examined. To do so, we analyzed food border notifications recorded by the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF). Path dependence and reputation effects of past border notifications were explored for the whole period 2001–13, and for sub-periods 2001–07 and 2008–13. Negative binomial (NB) and zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) distributions were used to deal with over-dispersion and excess of zero counts.

Our findings suggest that the EU cannot be considered as a single unit when non-tariff measures are studied, although there are some signs that Member State behaviour is becoming more uniform in the most recent period.