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Quality Certification of Infant Foods
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In this research, we ask whether child nutrition in developing countries could be improved by a program to test and certify the nutrient density of infant foods produced by local entrepreneurs.
Currently, the infant-food market is dominated by high-priced products, like those being displayed by the pharmacist in the first photo. These products are sold for 5-7 times the cost of nutritionally-similar alternatives developed by public health agencies. But when the lower-cost products are offered for sale, people don’t buy them.
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Our hypothesis is that people only buy the brand-name foods, even though they cannot afford enough quantity to meet their childrens’ needs, because they cannot observe these products’ nutritional content – so only a high priced brand name can be trusted to contain adequate nutrient density.
We measure mothers' demand for information about infant food quality using a market simulation experiment. The second picture shows the choices we offer: the high-priced name brand, or a variety of other products including some whose quality is certified by Mali’s national food and agriculture research service.
In our market experiment, mothers have an opportunity to
make real choices between these products, which tells us how much they care
about various product attributes. Using the choices of the woman pictured on the right, and the choices made by 238 other women in and around the city of Bamako, Mali, we are able to calculate the value of quality certification.
The result is consistent with the nobel-prize-winning ideas of George Akerlof: introducing quality certification would permit new entrants to compete with established brands, sharply reducing costs and increasing quantities sold in this market.
Using a rough budget for certification services, we estimate that the net welfare gains would be on the order of $20 per year per child of the relevant ages (6-24 months), which represents about one month's worth of adequate nutrition for that child.
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Citations and links to these papers are:
W.A. Masters and D. Sanogo, “Welfare Gains from Quality Certification of Infant Foods: Results from a Market Experiment in Mali”, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 84(4, November 2002): 974-989. (Link to preprint.)
D. Sanogo and W.A. Masters, “A Market-Based Approach to Child Nutrition: Mothers’ Demand for Quality Certification of Infant Foods in Bamako, Mali”, Food Policy, 27(3, November 2002): 251-268. (Link to preprint.)
This work is also documented in an unpublished French version, entitled Amélioration de la Nutrition Infantile. It attracted press coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and is also described in a 20-minute video designed for high-school economics classes.
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