Private Regulation of Food Safety by Supermarkets

Food safety is a highly debated issue. Food industry organizations, retailers and national and transnational governments have been trying to find new ways to regulate food safety. Can private regulation of food safety meet the high expectations? A review of existing literature shows some conditions to be important for effectively protecting public interests by private regulation. In particular, retailers worldwide are actively engaged in setting food safety standards for their suppliers. A case study of food safety regulation by Dutch retailers shows that they can force food industry organizations and producers to accept food safety standards because of their economic (market) power.     

Supply chains,contractual governance and certification regimes

Contractual governance of the food supply chain is on the rise. In this paper we focus on a particular set of instruments for transnational governance of food supply chains: transnational contracts and agreements. Looking at transnational contracts as instruments for implementation of transnational private regulation, we compare different mechanisms for the enforcement of safety and sustainability standards in global food supply chains. We conclude that the regime of contractual remedies follows different logics from the ones of regulatory and certification regime. (1) The former aims at redressing the victim of the breach inducing compliance through a re-active approach; whereas the latter pro-actively tries to restore compliance with regulatory process in order to pursue regulatory objectives. (2) The former focuses mainly on products, the latter on process. (3) The former concentrates on individual transactions while the latter focuses on the interdependence of contractual relationships along the chain and creates collective governance mechanisms. This paper suggests that the combination of the two sets of remedies may reinforce coordination and cooperation along the chain, therefore improving the level of quality, safety or sustainability of certified production. A higher level of awareness about the impact of standards and certification on the contract rules on remedies can have other positive consequences: it may improve contract drafting, leading the parties to coordinate different remedial systems when addressing the consequences of the breach and the ones of certification remedies; it may help courts to better define the scope and preconditions of contractual remedies and their effects on transnational regulation; it may guide law makers and standard setting institutions, when providing principles, rules or guidance concerning the consequences of the breach within contracts and along the chain, particularly in the food sector. From this perspective, the current work conducted by Unidroit and Fao for the production of a Legal Guide on contract farming could represent an important opportunity to define the links between multiple remedial regimes in food chains.     

Market Processes, Standardisation, and Tort Law

Private standards play a decisive role in tort law and in administrative law. Although they seem to be a perfect tool to achieve the goal of European integration, they tend to substitute democratic legitimacy with uncontrolled private governance. The loss of democratic control is accentuated by the failure of markets to provide sufficient incentives for standardising organisations to behave in a non-opportunistic manner. The dangers of cartelisation and oligopolistic behaviour are obvious. The approach to overcome these deficits is complex: on the one hand, an institutional governance of private organisations is necessary to incorporate third party interests in the process of enacting private standards; on the other hand, the legal effects of private standards have to be restricted to mere assumptions dependent on the democratic quality of their enacting process. The problem of democratic legitimacy is aggravated by the parallel substitution of state authorities' control by means of private certification organisations which control only the management procedures of firms. As these management systems are difficult to be evaluate, the opportunities for opportunistic behaviour amongst firms and certifiers increases. Moreover, markets themselves fail to discipline certifiers by virtue of a lack of observable factors which might indicate the quality of certification. Tort law, too, cannot fulfil that gap by providing liability for damages caused by undue certifications because tort law suffers from a variety of shortcomings such as missing protection of public goods and difficult assessments of causation linkages. In sum, the author argues for a mixture of market incentives, tort law and administrative law. Each sector must fill in the gaps left by the others.     

Signaling Environmental Stewardship in the Shadow of Weak Governance: The Global Diffusion of ISO 14001

This article examines how the quality of domestic regulatory institutions shapes the role of global economic networks in the cross‐national diffusion of private or voluntary programs embodying environmental norms and practices. We focus on ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 14001, the most widely adopted voluntary environmental program in the world, which encourages participating firms to adopt environmental stewardship policies beyond the requirement of extant laws. We hypothesize that firms are motivated to signal environmental stewardship via ISO 14001 certification to foreign customers and investors that have embraced this voluntary program, but only when these firms operate in countries with poor regulatory governance. Using a panel of 129 countries from 1997 to 2009, we find that bilateral export and bilateral investment pressures motivate firms to join ISO 14001 only when firms are located in countries with poor regulatory governance, as reflected in corruption levels. Thus, our article highlights how voluntary programs or private law operates in the shadow of public regulation, because the quality of public regulation shapes firms' incentives to join such programs.     

Robots,standards and the law: Rivalries between private standards and public policymaking for robot governance

This article explains the complex intertwinement between public and private regulators in the case of robot technology. Public policymaking ensures broad multi-stakeholder protected scope, but its abstractness often fails in intelligibility and applicability. Private standards, on the contrary, are more concrete and applicable, but most of the times they are voluntary and reflect industry interests. The ‘better regulation’ approach of the EU may increase the use of evidence to inform policy and lawmaking, and the involvement of different stakeholders. Current hard-lawmaking instruments do not appear to take advantage of the knowledge produced by standard-based regulations, virtually wasting their potential benefits. This fact affects the legal certainty with regards to a fast-paced changing environment like robotics. In this paper, we investigate the challenges of overlapping public/private regulatory initiatives that govern robot technologies in general, and in the concrete of healthcare robot technologies. We wonder until what extent robotics should be governed only by standards. We also reflect on how public policymaking could increase their technical understanding of robot technology to devise an applicable and comprehensive framework for this technology. In this respect, we propose different ways to integrate the technical know-how into policymaking (e.g., collecting the data/knowledge generated from the impact assessments in shared data repositories, and using it for evidence-based policies) and to strengthen the legitimacy of standards.     

Orchestration as a form of public action: The EU engagement with voluntary sustainability standards

EU authorities have come to engage with transnational private standards in the domain of sustainability in forms which are different from the traditional interplay based on agency relations and incorporation by reference. This phenomenon is evident in the domain of global value chain sustainability where the employment of voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) is permitted in certain EU measures. This contribution depicts the main features of orchestration as a distinct form of public action involving transnational private regulation. It lays down the reasons underpinning public ‘use’ of forms of public authority, it highlights the potential for orchestration in publicising transnational private rules and it exposes the hidden dynamics stemming from the interplay between public and private rules. It discusses the conditions under which orchestration can enhance the effectiveness of public measures, and how orchestration can transform transnational private regimes by steering their substance and procedures.     

Fostering rational regulation of patient safety

After decades of inattention to the problem of medical injuries, patient safety is now occupying a prominent place on the health policy agenda and garnering renewed regulatory interest. Health care providers' behavior, with respect to patient safety and health care quality improvement, is now being shaped by top-down regulation through statutes and administrative agency oversight, as well as bottom-up drivers such as tort litigation and the forces of the consumer-driven health care market. Patient safety today exemplifies that eclectic mix of regulation that can occur when a new problem is exposed to the general public; it also demonstrates the difficulties of coordinating regulatory signals from multiple sources and regulating incomplete information. This article reviews the evolution of the regulatory environment for patient safety, examines some of the tensions and challenges that currently define patient safety oversight, and suggests strategies for more rational and responsive regulation.     

Health care policy issues in the drug abuser treatment field

As we enter the 1990s drug abuse has once again become a major health concern, and for the first time the drug treatment field has had to address many of the policy, regulation, and planning issues resulting from cost inflation that have become commonplace in other parts of the health care field. To avoid serious errors and confusion, drug abuse health policies must recognize the very different needs of the public and private sectors. The public sector, where poor addicts receive drug treatment provided or purchased by the government, has long suffered from chronically inadequate funding. Although responses to several epidemics (heroin, crack, and AIDS) have produced periods of increased allocations for drug abuse treatment, more often than not long waiting lists at programs have rationed treatment to lower-income addicts seeking care. Low salary levels have limited the quality of public treatment services, and the absence of resources has hindered the development of programs that respond to new technical developments and drug abuse problems, such as the crack epidemic. Despite severe resource shortages, the public drug treatment system has sometimes used resources inefficiently, with little attention to appropriateness of admissions, lengths of stay, ambulatory treatment modalities, or varying levels of care. Public sector goals for the 1990s should include filling current shortages in drug treatment services, developing adequate long-term funding for treating addicts who lack third-party coverage, modernizing the treatment system, developing new patterns of practice that use existing resources more efficiently, and developing a plan for treating intravenous drug users infected with the AIDS virus. In the private sector, the advent of working- and middle-class demand for drug treatment in the 1970s and 1980s has produced a new drug treatment system that suffers from many of the policy problems common to the rest of health care. Drug abuse in the workplace has resulted in much wider coverage of substance abuse services by insurance companies and HMOs. The availability of third-party funds has spawned a for-profit chemical dependency treatment industry. The high cost of private residential treatment services has caused significant cost inflation. Cost-containment measures, which are a new phenomenon for this field and are inappropriate for the public sector, have led to the same confusion and debates that they have produced in other areas of health care.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

消费安全的法律规制——达芬奇事件引发的思考

达芬奇公司的虚假宣传和虚假标识行为已构成对消费者的欺诈,不仅损害了消费者的合法权益,还扰乱了市场经济秩序。消费者安全权属于经济法的权利范畴,政府应当承担起规制市场失灵、维护消费安全的职责,选择正确的规制工具并及时执行法律。只有将信息规制、私的规制等规制工具加以组合运用,并保证刑罚作为规制的后盾,完善消费安全规制的制度路径,才能有效保障消费安全。     

Data registers in respiratory medicine: a pilot project evaluating compliance with privacy laws and the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans

This article reports on data from a small pilot survey evaluating the compliance of voluntary databases in respiratory medicine with privacy laws and the National Health and Medical Research Council's National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans. The increasing complexity of privacy law, including the recent private sector amendments, creates many challenges for database administrators. The impact of privacy laws upon voluntary or non-statutory databases, and upon doctors reporting patient data to such databases, is far from straightforward. The article suggests way in which the law might be adapted in order to better facilitate the role of voluntary data registers in health research and public health surveillance, while still protecting the privacy of patient information. The article also briefly considers how database administrators might "future-proof" their existing data holdings to ensure compliance with legal and ethical standards.     

Private Interests Seeking Punishment: Prosecution Brought by Private Individuals and Groups in Spain

This article centers on the study of the Spanish private prosecution system. It is an attempt to highlight both its theoretical potential and its practical dysfunctions. This type of lay participation in criminal matters is often seen as a way to strengthen democracy or to legitimate justice, opinions that the author rejects. Although private prosecution may work as a safety valve against the public prosecutor's inactivity, the introduction of private interests in the penal process may distort its true significance and function. Private prosecution can become a Trojan horse within the system.     

私人标准对SPS协定的挑战

食品安全领域私人标准的大量涌现成为国际贸易的新课题，其产生是几方合力的结果，有着特定的社会基础和自身发展规律，对国际食品贸易的负面影响大于积极影响，特别对发展中国家中小食品生产和经营者不利。私人标准在提供更高水平安全食品供给的同时，对SPS协定构成了新的挑战，而现有SPS协议框架对私人标准的规范存在无管辖权、对非政府实体没有明确界定等诸多法律困境。以何种方式对私人标准进行回应将是SPS委员会亟待解决的问题。     

Regulating to ensure patient safety in hospitals: towards a comprehensive framework

This article critically examines the successes and failures of the current internal and external regulatory regimes for ensuring the delivery of patient safety in public hospitals. It argues that governments should develop a holistic approach to regulation through the enhancement of existing compliance mechanisms in conjunction with some formal regulation to ensure that public hospital systems-deliver high standards of service with minimal patient harm. It recommends that a Patient Safety Authority be established in order to assist with the monitoring of incidents and the enforcement of compliance with patient safety standards.     

法治视野下食品安全诚信构建

食品安全问题层出不穷,构建食品安全诚信是遏制食品安全问题、满足人们群众健康需求的迫切需要。首先,食品安全诚信建设必须以法治为保障,发挥法律的规范、引导作用。其次,构建食品安全失信惩戒机制,包括强化对失信行为的刑事处罚及行政处罚、完善行业禁人制度。最后,构建食品安全诚信信息体系,建立起食品安全信用监管体制、征信体制、评价制度、披露制度等,并建立政府、行业、社会三个层面的诚信数据库。     

我国公共餐饮行业餐饮具卫生质量现状及问题分析

近年来,随着生活节奏的加快和生活水平的提高,外出就餐人数剧增,餐饮食品安全成为全民关注的焦点。政府监管部门每年大力度地开展一系列食品安全的整治行动,但大型、恶性食物中毒等事件仍时有发生,全国的食物中毒发生率居高不下。而餐饮具作为食品的＂隐形添加剂＂是食品的＂贴身衣物＂,其卫生质量安全直接关系到广大消费者的身体健康,民众对此的呼声也越来越高。目前,餐饮行业餐饮具卫生质量存在较多问题,亟待规范和整治。本文阐述餐饮具消毒的意义和重要性,归类了我国近几年餐饮具消毒模式的发展与演变,描述了餐饮行业餐饮具卫生质量现状并对存在的问题进行了分析。     

Management-Based Regulation: Prescribing Private Management to Achieve Public Goals

We analyze a little-studied regulatory approach that we call management-based regulation. Management-based regulation directs regulated organizations to engage in a planning process that aims toward the achievement of public goals, offering firms flexibility in how they achieve public goals. In this article, we develop a framework for assessing conditions for using management-based regulation as opposed to the more traditional technology-based or performance-based regulation. Drawing on case studies of management-based regulation in the areas of food safety, industrial safety, and environmental protection, we show how management-based regulation can be an effective strategy when regulated entities are heterogeneous and regulatory outputs are relatively difficult to monitor. In addition to analyzing conditions for the use of management-based regulation, we assess the range of choices regulators confront in designing management-based regulations. We conclude that management-based regulation requires a far more complex intertwining of the public and private sectors than is typical of other forms of regulation, owing to regulators' need to intervene at multiple stages of the production process as well as to the degree of ambiguity over what constitutes "good management."     

Private credentialing of health care personnel: an antitrust perspective. Part One

This Article explores the antitrust and other implications of private credentialing and accrediting programs in the health care industry. Although such programs are usually sponsored by powerful competitor groups, they serve the procompetitive purpose of providing useful information and authoritative advice to independent decision makers. Part One examines the risk that credentialing will sometimes be unfair to competitors and deceive consumers. Its survey of common-law, antitrust, and regulatory interventions to correct such unfairness and deception seeks to determine the degree of oversight to which credentialing and similar activities have been and should be subjected. In recommending that judicial or regulatory scrutiny should be limited to discovering whether standards and practices have a rational relation to a procompetitive purpose, the Article argues that greater intrusion into credentialing schemes would be inconsistent with market theory and first amendment values and would discourage line-drawing efforts that stimulate competition and facilitate consumer choice. By emphasizing throughout that personnel certification and institutional accreditation embody ideology and opinion as well as factual information, Part One sets the stage for the argument in Part Two that antitrust law can and should be used to contest the dominance of a single ideology of health care and to facilitate the development of alternative sources of consumer information. The Article's overall thesis is that, whereas the quality of advice given to the public about health care personnel and similar matters should not be closely regulated, neither should the supply of competing information and opinion be artificially curtailed.     

后危机时代“太大而不能倒”金融机构监管法律问题研究

"太大而不能倒"不仅扰乱了正常的市场竞争秩序,而且其收益私人化与损失社会化的反差也助长和放大了道德风险,并为系统性金融风险的不定期性爆发埋下了伏笔。后危机时代,将"太大而不能倒"类机构纳入严格监管的范畴,确保金融体系的安全可期已成为宏观审慎监管中一个不可或缺的节点。虽然规模、关联性、可替代性已成为"太大而不能倒"机构识别的共识性标准,但是如何有效评估并配备相适的监管规则却仍是任重而道远。创新素来具有两面性,在制度取得突破的同时,如何防止公权膨胀对私权的进一步侵蚀与挤压也是当下不能不深察的大问题。     

道地药材地理标志保护模式研究

在传统知识的保护体系中,道地药材的传统知识特性与地理标志的集体化特征,使得私权保护范式的证明商标制度,于我国的道地药材地理标志保护,有着现实的不适应。肯定和重塑公法性质的保护制度是务实之选。我国的道地药材地理标志保护需要厘清公权与私权保护的界限,其中公权力机关的责任是确立道地药材标准并保障监管的有效性,私权利主体则需实现药材生产的集约化,并保证权利个体利益分享的公平。     

The cost of regulation in a decentralized context: the case of the Spanish regions

The impact of regulation on productivity is an issue that has attracted increasing interest in recent decades, as some scholars have argued that the proliferation of red tape may be the cause of slower growth rates in some western economies. Regulation (and other public instruments) has significant effects that may be either benign or harmful. Justified and well designed regulation protects consumers from potentially unsafe products, limits pollution, enhances workplace safety and contributes to public health and safety, as well as a more productive and fair society. However, an overabundance of rules or badly designed regulation can cause confusion and delay, impose unreasonable compliance costs in terms of capital investment, labour and official paperwork, retard innovation, lower productivity and, accidentally, distort incentives for private initiative. The objective of this paper is to examine the possible impact of regulatory activity in the Spanish regions over the past decade (1989–2001) on growth and productivity.