Socio-economic evaluation within the MoniQA Network of Excellence (NoE)

 Socio-economic impact of food safety and quality regulations is one of the important issues covered by the joint research activities of the MoniQA Network of Excellence . Among other research activities, MoniQA aims to provide support for a systematic assessment of the socio-economic impact of EU food quality and safety regulations. Impacts are evaluated in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and consistency, administrative costs as well as the impact on international trade, considering different stakeholders (consumers, industry, regulatory and control bodies, etc.) and different aggregation levels (micro versus macro impacts). This web-site provides the latest information on results from joint research and work in progress within Workpackage 7 of the MoniQA Network, which targets socio-economic research.

1.      A Socio-Economic Impact Assessment Toolbox for Better Future Regulations

The MoniQA NoE deals with the systematic assessment of new regulations in the field of food quality and safety. MoniQA will set evaluation criteria (e.g. effectiveness, efficiency and consistency) and it will compare the impact of different options in qualitative, quantitative and monetary terms. The project will also assess the administrative costs imposed by new regulations in the field of food quality and safety.

The overall aim of the MoniQA activities in the field of socio-economic impact assessment is to develop an evaluation toolbox to better predict the socio-economic impact on the various levels (EU and national administration, manufacturing and trading sectors, individual industries, companies and SMEs, and finally the consumers) when regulations are changed or new regulations are introduced in the area of food safety. The evaluation tool is fed with data from the MoniQA working groups, MoniQA case studies, peer-reviewed publications and case studies done elsewhere, from data collected by the University of Bologna (Italy), the University of Bonn (Germany), and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences (Austria), supported by input from the European Commission’s DG SANCO and DG Research.

In 2009 the concept of the decision support system and the resulting evaluation toolbox were presented to representatives from various EC-DGs, EFSA, and MoniQA experts at DG Research of the European Commission in Brussels, in form of a Joint MoniQA-EC workshop on “Better Regulations”, dealing with socio-economic impact assessment to support the establishment of better future regulations. The outcome of the workshop was the confirmed need of such a tool for legislators and the potential users in industry and regulatory agencies in the EU and around the globe.

Background:

Workpackage 7 (Socio-economic evaluation)

• To enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of new food quality and safety regulations, social scientists within MoniQA are developing new procedures to perform socio-economic impact assessment.
• Key contributing partners are the University of Bologna (UNIBO, workpackage leader), International Centre for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences (ICCR), and University of Bonn (UniBonn).
• Other relevant contributing partners are:
  • Italian National Research Council, Institute of Science of Food Production (CNR)
  • Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM)
  • Campden BRI (CamBRI)
  • Eurofins Analytik GmbH (EUROFINS)
  • UK Food & Environment Research Agency (FERA)

WP7 Objective

Perform a systematic assessment of new EU food quality and safety regulations with respect to industry, control and regulatory bodies and regarding their socio-economic impacts in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and consistency, their administrative costs and their impact on international trade

Activities in WP7

Task 1 (led by ICCR) – Develop and test a generic evaluation framework based on the regulatory impact assessment guidelines of the European Commission for assessing the impacts at country level of compliance with food safety regulations, thus establishing a basis for systematically assessing the costs and benefits of alignment or harmonization at multilateral level. This task implements four pilot case studies on the ex-ante evaluation of new regulations and testing methods. Final output: a general evaluation framework tested through impact assessment on the pilot case studies at the country level.

Task 2 (led by UNI-BONN) – Explore conflicts between effectiveness of policy implementation at the “micro” level (e.g. compliance by individual firms) and the overall success of policies at the “macro” level by developing a decision support system (DSS) which can be applied at different decision levels. The DSS is able to capture obstacles to the implementation of the policy faced at the individual firm level (e.g. high compliance costs compared to relatively low individual risk of failure) compared to the outcomes at more aggregate level (e.g. the overall failure risk for a whole sector or for all firms in a given countries is substantially higher than the individual risk). Final outputs: (1) A computer-based operational decision support system which allows to disentangle micro-behaviours and their aggregated impact, and provides a helpful multi-stakeholder tool, in particular at the policy-making level. (2) An assessment of developments in analytical methods from a micro-level perspective..

Task 3 (led by UNIBO) – Improve assessment by suggesting an evaluation toolbox based on complementarities and overlapping of the evaluation framework and DSS being developed in tasks 1 and 2. The toolbox will synthesize these outputs into an “information centre” which contains procedures on: (1) information on data availability, data gaps and quantitative/qualitative data collection procedures; (2) a systematic classification of impacts, linked to the literature and existing knowledge basis on (a) outcomes of previous evaluations for the same impact and similar regulatory interventions; (b) quantitative methods available for the quantification of impacts; (3) results from validation on MoniQA case studies; (4) up-to-date guidelines on evaluation strategies considering heterogeneity of stakeholders and the level of aggregation. Final output: evaluation toolbox, i.e. a validated procedure for systematic assessment of food safety regulations both at the individual and the aggregate levels, to provide support to evaluators and policy-makers.