Publication: A Race to the Top? A Case Study of Food Safety Standards and African Exports
Loading...
Date
2001-03
ISSN
Published
2001-03
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Growing concern over health risks associated with food products is at the forefront of trade policy debate. At the heart of this debate is the "precautionary principle," which holds that precautions should be taken against health, safety, and environmental risks even when science has not established direct cause-and-effect relationships--as with, for example, the EUropean ban on hormone-treated beef. The authors quantify the impact on food exports from African countries of new EUropean Union standards for aflatoxins, structurally related toxic compounds that contaminate certain foods and lead to the production of acute liver carcinogens in the human body. The authors estimate the impact of changes in differing levels of such protection based on the EU standards (and suggested by international standards) for 15 EUropean countries and 9 African countries between 1989 and 1998. The results suggest that implementation of the EU's new aflatoxin standards will significantly hurt African exports to EUrope of nuts, cereals, and dried fruits, which are highly sensitive to the aflatoxin standards. The EU standards would reduce health risks by only about 1.4 deaths per billion a year but would cut African exports by 64 percent, or $670 million, compared with their level under international standards.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Otsuki, Tsunehiro; Wilson, John S.; Sewadeh, Mirvat. 2001. A Race to the Top? A Case Study of Food Safety Standards and African Exports. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 2563. © http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19691 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Geopolitics and the World Trading System(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23)Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05)Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.Publication Global Socio-economic Resilience to Natural Disasters(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-22)Most disaster risk assessments use damages to physical assets as their central metric, often neglecting distributional impacts and the coping and recovery capacity of affected people. To address this shortcoming, the concepts of well-being losses and socio-economic resilience—the ability to experience asset losses without a decline in well-being—have been proposed. This paper uses microsimulations to produce a global estimate of well-being losses from, and socio-economic resilience to, natural disasters, covering 132 countries. On average, each $1 in disaster-related asset losses results in well-being losses equivalent to a $2 uniform national drop in consumption, with significant variation within and across countries. The poorest income quintile within each country incurs only 9% of national asset losses but accounts for 33% of well-being losses. Compared to high-income countries, low-income countries experience 67% greater well-being losses per dollar of asset losses and require 56% more time to recover. Socio-economic resilience is uncorrelated with exposure or vulnerability to natural hazards. However, a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with a 0.9 percentage point gain in resilience, but this benefit arises indirectly—such as through higher rate of formal employment, better financial inclusion, and broader social protection coverage—rather than from higher income itself. This paper assess ten policy options and finds that socio-economic and financial interventions (such as insurance and social protection) can effectively complement asset-focused measures (e.g., construction standards) and that interventions targeting low-income populations usually have higher returns in terms of avoided well-being losses per dollar invested.Publication From Patriarchy to Policy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Legal institutions play an important role in shaping gender equality in economic domains, from inheritance to labor markets. But where do gender equal laws come from? Using cross-country data on social norms and legal equality, this paper investigates the socio-cultural roots of gender inequity in the legal system and its implications for female labor force participation. To identify the impact of social norms, the analysis uses an empirical strategy that exploits pre-modern differences in ancestral patriarchal culture as an instrument for present-day gender norms. The findings show that ancestral patriarchal culture is a strong predictor of contemporary norms, and conservative social norms are associated with more gender inequality in the de jure legal framework, the de facto implementation of laws, and the labor market. The paper presents evidence for a political selection mechanism linking norms to laws: countries with more conservative norms elect political leaders who are more hostile to gender equality, who then pass less progressive legislation. The results highlight the cultural roots and political drivers of legalized gender inequality.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Global Trade and Food Safety : Winners and Losers in a Fragmented System(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2001-10)Food safety standards, and the tradeoff between these standards, and agricultural export growth, are at the forefront of the trade policy debate. How food safety is addressed in the world trade system, is critical for developing countries that continue to rely on agricultural exports. In a fragmented system of conflicting national food safety standards, and no globally accepted standards, export prospects for the least developed countries, can be severely limited. The authors examine the impact that adopting international food safety standards, and harmonizing standards would have on global food trade patterns. They estimate the effect of aflatoxin standards in fifteen importing countries (including four developing countries) on exports from thirty one countries (twenty one of them developing). Aflatoxin is a natural substance that can contaminate certain nuts, and grains when storage, and drying facilities are inadequate. The analysis shows that adopting a worldwide standard for aflatoxin B1 (potentially the most toxic of aflatoxins) based on current international guidelines, would increase nut, and cereal trade among the countries studied, by $ 6.1 billion, compared with 1998 levels. This harmonization of standards would increase world exports by $ 38.8 billion.Publication Agricultural Policies and Trade Paths in Turkey(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-10)In 1959, shortly after the European Economic Community was founded under the 1957 Treaty of Rome, Turkey applied for Associate Membership in the then six-member common market. By 1963, a path for integrating the economies of Turkey and the eventual European Union had been mapped. As with many trade agreements, agriculture posed difficult political hurdles, which were never fully cleared, even as trade barriers to other sectors were eventually removed and a Customs Union formed. This essay traces the influences the Turkey-European Union economic institutions have had on agricultural policies and the agriculture sector. An applied general equilibrium framework is used to provide estimates of what including agriculture under the Customs Union would mean for the sector and the economy. The paper also discusses the implications of fully aligning Turkey's agricultural policies with the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy, as would be required under full membership.Publication The Effect of Product Standards on Agricultural Exports from Developing Countries(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-06)The authors create a standards restrictiveness index using newly available data on maximum residue levels of pesticides for 61 importing countries. The paper analyzes the impact that food safety standards have on international trade of agricultural products. The findings suggest that more restrictive standards are associated, on average, with a lower probability of observing trade. However, after controlling for sample selection and the proportion of exporting firms in a gravity model, the analysis finds that the effect of standards on trade intensity is indistinguishable from zero. This is consistent with the assumption that meeting stringent standards increases primarily the fixed costs of exporting. Once firms enter the market, however, standards do not impact the level of exports. The analysis also finds a greater marginal effect of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) standards on the probability of trade, relative to other countries' standards, keeping in mind however that on average BRICS standards are less restrictive. The analysis also suggests that exporters in low-income countries are more adversely affected by stricter standards.Publication The Role of Agriculture in a Modernizing Society(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-05)China's success in addressing food problems after adopting the reforms in 1978 has been nothing less than remarkable. Grain output (rice, wheat and maize) has almost doubled and most hunger has been eliminated. Ever since China embarked on its reform agenda more than 30 years ago, its economic growth and poverty reduction have been nothing less than remarkable. Agriculture has been an important contributor to these developments. Since 1978, China has almost doubled its cereal production (rice, wheat and maize) and it is now feeding 1.3 billion people, or 20 percent of the world's population, while having less than 11 percent of the world s agricultural land and less than 6 percent of its water. New challenges are presenting themselves for China's agriculture, and old ones are resurfacing. High (land saving) Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth and increasingly open domestic and international markets, combined with grain self-sufficiency targets, a multitude of very small, fragmented production structures, and distorted land and labor markets have defined Chinese agriculture over the past three decades. The relative importance of agriculture s three problems in policymaking thus evolves during the course of development away from the food to the farm and field problems. This shift has however recently been compounded by a resurgence of the food problem, as global supplies struggle to keep up with demand. China's agriculture anno 2030 will be predominantly a modern commercial smallholder agriculture that ensures self-sufficiency in cereal food (rice and wheat), but not in cereal feed (maize and soybeans). The sector will maximize rural employment opportunities in labor intensive high value agricultural products and act as a diligent custodian of its precious natural resources.Publication Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in India and Other South Asia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-09)This chapter deals with the distortions to price incentives for agriculture that result from the trade, exchange rate and domestic policies in place in the four main South Asian countries, by summarizing and comparing the findings and themes of the more-detailed case studies on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Attention is paid most to India, which accounts for around four fifths of South Asia's population, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and agricultural GDP. The principal focus is on the level of and trends in distortions for agriculture as a whole, and how these have changed over time relative to those for non-agricultural traded sectors in these countries. Previous studies have established that in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, policies strongly favored manufacturing over the principal agricultural crops, although the extent of anti agricultural bias diminished considerably between the 1970s to 1995. The new country studies extend the earlier estimates up to 2005 and back to 1965, and provide long term estimates of distortions to relative agricultural incentives in Bangladesh for the first time. As well, these new studies broaden the coverage of previous research by including estimates for the fresh fruit and vegetables sector in India, and the dairying sectors in India and Pakistan. In South Asia both of these sectors account for large shares of the rural economy as measured by their contributions to GDP.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Economic Recovery(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04-06)World Bank Group President David Malpass spoke about the world facing major challenges, including COVID, climate change, rising poverty and inequality and growing fragility and violence in many countries. He highlighted vaccines, working closely with Gavi, WHO, and UNICEF, the World Bank has conducted over one hundred capacity assessments, many even more before vaccines were available. The World Bank Group worked to achieve a debt service suspension initiative and increased transparency in debt contracts at developing countries. The World Bank Group is finalizing a new climate change action plan, which includes a big step up in financing, building on their record climate financing over the past two years. He noted big challenges to bring all together to achieve GRID: green, resilient, and inclusive development. Janet Yellen, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, mentioned focusing on vulnerable people during the pandemic. Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, focused on giving everyone a fair shot during a sustainable recovery. All three commented on the importance of tackling climate change.Publication South Asia Development Update, April 2024: Jobs for Resilience(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-02)South Asia is expected to continue to be the fastest-growing emerging market and developing economy (EMDE) region over the next two years. This is largely thanks to robust growth in India, but growth is also expected to pick up in most other South Asian economies. However, growth in the near-term is more reliant on the public sector than elsewhere, whereas private investment, in particular, continues to be weak. Efforts to rein in elevated debt, borrowing costs, and fiscal deficits may eventually weigh on growth and limit governments' ability to respond to increasingly frequent climate shocks. Yet, the provision of public goods is among the most effective strategies for climate adaptation. This is especially the case for households and farms, which tend to rely on shifting their efforts to non-agricultural jobs. These strategies are less effective forms of climate adaptation, in part because opportunities to move out of agriculture are limited by the region’s below-average employment ratios in the non-agricultural sector and for women. Because employment growth is falling short of working-age population growth, the region fails to fully capitalize on its demographic dividend. Vibrant, competitive firms are key to unlocking the demographic dividend, robust private investment, and workers’ ability to move out of agriculture. A range of policies could spur firm growth, including improved business climates and institutions, the removal of financial sector restrictions, and greater openness to trade and capital flows.Publication Media and Messages for Nutrition and Health(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) has experienced rapid and significant economic growth over the past decade. However, poor nutritional outcomes remain a concern. Rates of childhood undernutrition are particularly high in remote, rural, and upland areas. Media have the potential to play an important role in shaping health and nutrition–related behaviors and practices as well as in promoting sociocultural and economic development that might contribute to improved nutritional outcomes. This report presents the results of a media audit (MA) that was conducted to inform the development and production of mass media advocacy and communication strategies and materials with a focus on maternal and child health and nutrition that would reach the most people from the poorest communities in northern Lao PDR. Making more people aware of useful information, essential services and products and influencing them to use these effectively is the ultimate goal of mass media campaigns, and the MA measures the potential effectiveness of media efforts to reach this goal. The effectiveness of communication channels to deliver health and nutrition messages to target beneficiaries to ensure maximum reach and uptake can be viewed in terms of preferences, satisfaction, and trust. Overall, the four most accessed media channels for receiving information among communities in the study areas were village announcements, mobile phones, television, and out-of-home (OOH) media. Of the accessed media channels, the top three most preferred channels were village announcements (40 percent), television (26 percent), and mobile phones (19 percent). In terms of trust, village announcements were the most trusted source of information (64 percent), followed by mobile phones (14 percent) and television (11 percent). Hence of all the media channels, village announcements are the most preferred, have the most satisfied users, and are the most trusted source of information in study communities from four provinces in Lao PDR with some of the highest burden of childhood undernutrition.Publication Remarks at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10-12)World Bank Group President David Malpass discussed biodiversity and climate change being closely interlinked, with terrestrial and marine ecosystems serving as critically important carbon sinks. At the same time climate change acts as a direct driver of biodiversity and ecosystem services loss. The World Bank has financed biodiversity conservation around the world, including over 116 million hectares of Marine and Coastal Protected Areas, 10 million hectares of Terrestrial Protected Areas, and over 300 protected habitats, biological buffer zones and reserves. The COVID pandemic, biodiversity loss, climate change are all reminders of how connected we are. The recovery from this pandemic is an opportunity to put in place more effective policies, institutions, and resources to address biodiversity loss.Publication Mexico Poverty and Equity Assessment(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-02-20)This Mexico Poverty and Equity Assessment reviews the evidence about poverty and equity in Mexico over the last two decades, compares it to comparable international experience, and identifies a set of critical areas of policy intervention to answer the opening question. The report aims at contributing to an open conversation in Mexico about how to achieve this essential policy objective. This report postulates three main policy areas needed for poverty eradication in Mexico: inclusive growth, efficient social policy, and infrastructure to confront vulnerability. The report includes four sections, the first three of which collect evidence about poverty, social deprivations, and vulnerability and how the evolution of these three correlates to patterns of economic growth, social protection policy and territorial development. The fourth section provides some quantitative benchmarks of what it would take to eradicate extreme poverty in Mexico. Poverty in Mexico is defined not only in monetary terms, but also in a multidimensional manner that includes social deprivations. These are social deprivations that often define formal-vs-informal employment, so policy changes that close these carencias, as they are called in Mexico, will also reduce the informality gap. This report documents the evolution of poverty, social deprivations, and vulnerability to poverty. It explains the main forces that have driven this evolution and advises that many of these forces may not operate the same in the future as they did in the past. It provides the basis to argue that short to medium term extreme poverty eradication requires newer policy actions in terms of inclusive growth, more efficient social policy, and investments in physical and social infrastructure to reduce vulnerability. The report indicates that short to medium term eradication to extreme poverty is a major, but within reach, development challenge for Mexico.