Micro-simulation of households: a new tool to assess the impact on society of food safety policies

Public concerns about the risk from food hazards have spread in recent years, boosted by a number of well-publicized food scares. As a result, food safety issues are high on the policy agenda in Europe and elsewhere, and a range of policies have been developed to deal with them. The paper illustrates and makes a case for the use of micro-simulation models as support for better economic assessment of food policies. When households deal with food safety issues they can show heterogeneous behaviors, and micro-simulation can provide a useful tool to take into account this heterogeneity. However, to the author's knowledge, no attempt to use micro-simulation in the analysis of food safety policies has taken place so far. After an illustration of the way economists evaluate food safety policies, micro-simulation methodologies are introduced, stressing their potentiality for the assessment of food safety policies.