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Political and Economic Determinants of Asynchronous Approval of New GM Events

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2018

Maurício Benedeti Rosa ,
Rosane Nunes de Faria  and
Eduardo Rodrigues de Castro
Maurício Benedeti Rosa
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Federal University of Sao Carlos
Rosane Nunes de Faria*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Federal University of Sao Carlos
Eduardo Rodrigues de Castro
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Federal University of Sao Carlos
*
*Email: rnfaria@ufscar.br
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Abstract

We use a political economy perspective to provide the first empirical analysis of the main political and economic determinants of asynchronous approval (AA) for a variety of countries over the period 2000–2015. The key results that emerge from our paper are the prominent role of regulatory quality and the number of internet users in a particular country in influencing AA across countries. We found that the higher the share of internet users in a country, the lower the AA. Consumer access to the internet makes them less exposed to negative news about genetically modified (GM) products, as they are less influenced by the negative bias of traditional mass media toward biotechnology. Additionally, the better the regulation quality (the more efficiently a government formulates and implements regulation), the shorter the time necessary to approve new GM events, and the lower the AA. Furthermore, our findings confirm that determinants such as corruption, trade relations with stringent markets, and the size of the rural population are also important in explaining AA of GM events.

Keywords

asynchronous approvalGM regulationeconomic and political determinantsdynamic panel data
Type
Research Article
Information
World Trade Review , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 75 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © Maurício Benedeti Rosa et al. 2018

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Footnotes

This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.

In countries that have already established GM regulation, a necessary condition for commercialization of a GM crop is the regulatory approval of each new GM event1 for import or production (Kalaitzandonakes, 2011; Vigani and Olper, 2013). However, the regulatory approval processes for a new GM event differ considerably across countries. Thus, the same event is not approved simultaneously in different countries, which creates a situation known as asynchronous approval (AA) (Stein and Rodríguez-Cerezo, 2010).

1

A GM event refers to a DNA recombination that is later used to create entire transgenic organisms. Plant lineage originating from transgenic events is considered genetically modified (GMO-COMPASS, 2013).

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