Sanitary and Phytosanitary measures in agri-food imports from the european union: Reputation effects over time

Abstract

The EU's Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed provides information on sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) notifications. With a set of data from the 1998-2013 period, we test the hypothesis that past notifications can determine current notifications. This is the "reputation effect", meaning that inspectors may tend to target products or countries with previous SPS problems. We analyze the scope of the reputation effect over time. We used two count data models to estimate the distribution of current notifications. In line with previous literature, our findings indicate that reputation does affect current EU notifications. Furthermore, we identify some relevant exporter countries for which reputation is long-lasting.