Measuring the Impacts of Food Safety Regulations: A Methodological Review

Together with a call for more effective and efficient regulations in the EU, there is a growing demand for transparency in the evaluation methods used to assess their effects. This paper proposes a classification of the impacts that food safety regulations can produce and discusses the quantitative methods that are used in the literature to measure those impacts. Along with the strengths and limitations of each methodological approach, this review highlights other transversal issues relevant when developing assessment strategies, like the unbalance 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.