Sanitary and phytosanitary standards: Does consumers’ health protection justify developing countries’ producers’ exclusion?

The objective of this paper is to analyze the effects public regulatory tools for food safety, notably maximum admitted contamination thresholds and official controls performed at importing country’s borders on both developing countries’ market access and consumers’ health. An Industrial Economics approach is developed that endogenizes the sanitary risk associated with imports by explicitly taking into account the interaction between the public regulatory tools and the strategic response of producers/exporters. Producers’ strategic reaction is shown to crucially depend on the characteristics of the economic environment. Moreover, a regulatory reinforcement may exacerbate producers/exporters exclusion without improving consumers’ health protection.