The urban–rural gap in the demand for food safety in China: The role of food label knowledge

Abstract

Despite the national promotion of food safety measures, a substantial urban–rural gap remains in the demand for food safety in China. To explain this gap, we explore the role of knowledge of food safety labels. We measure demand using the marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for the green food label and the organic food label for rice and pork in urban and rural areas. We employ discrete choice experiments and the control function approach to control for potential endogeneity problems. The results show that the MWTP for the labels is significantly positive among people with label knowledge but insignificant or even negative among people without label knowledge, and the urban–rural gap in the MWTP is larger among the former than among the latter. These knowledge‐related differences explain 8–29% of the urban–rural gap in the MWTP for the green food label. Our findings imply that improving knowledge about the green food label could potentially be effective in reducing the urban–rural gap, while our results also imply the existence of a future challenge for the government in promoting label knowledge more effectively in rural China.

Covid‐19‐tested food labels

“…However, we find that the coefficients of the interaction terms are inconsistent in signs and are mostly statistically insignificant or only marginally significant around the 10% level, which suggests that knowledge generally does not have a deterministic impact on consumer preference for Covid‐19‐tested labels (shown in Table A2 in Appendix ). This result is different from some previous findings that knowing more about food safety labels is generally correlated with higher WTP for those labels (Drugova et al., 2020; Shimokawa et al., 2021).…”

“…Despite the sparse literature on Covid‐19‐tested labels, there are abundant studies on food safety labels (e.g., Gao et al., 2019; Shimokawa et al., 2021). Among the determinants of consumer choice concerning food safety labels, the entity authenticating label certifications, the food country of origin, consumer knowledge of the labels, and consumer socio‐demographics often have significant impacts.…”

“…Third, knowledge of food safety has proven to be critical in consumer food purchasing behavior, such as knowledge about organic food (Díaz et al., 2012; Drugova et al., 2020) and about food safety labels (Shimokawa et al., 2021). Meanwhile, ample literature has discussed changes in consumer food consumption behavior due to increasing food safety awareness associated with Covid‐19, such as cooking more at home or turning to online shopping (Fanelli, 2021; Min et al., 2020; Soon et al., 2021; Zafar et al., 2021).…”

“…On the one hand, these products are fairly important in Chinese residents’ daily diet. For example, rice is the most widely consumed cereal product and considered as a dietary staple in China (Shimokawa et al., 2021). On the other hand, these food products have become increasingly popular in China.…”

Telling You More Fluently: Effect of the Joint Presentation of Eco-Label Information on Consumers’ Purchase Intention

“…The eco-label was the “Euro-leaf” organic certification, which has been mandatory in Europe since 2010. A survey in China found that only 16.5% of participants recognized it [ 78 ]. We therefore used the Euro-leaf eco-label as the stimulus to better illustrate the effect of JPEI on increasing participants’ cognitive fluency among low eco-label knowledge consumers.…”