An Analysis of Food Safety Private Investments Drivers in the Italian Meat Sector

Abstract

The general focus of this study is to investigate the decision to invest in food safety as a field of connection between public and private strategies. The objective if the study is to investigate how the legislation pressure influence the decision to invest in food safety systems. The basic idea is to conceptualize the allocation of the decision right to invest among the transaction party, counterparty and regulator as a source of drivers of investments. While the allocation of the decision rights is recognized as the key factor in coping with uncertainty (Gibbons, 2005), it is also here held as term of the micro-foundations of the organizational arrangements (Grandori, Furnari, 2008).
Food companies and agricultural farms pay a great and necessary attention to technologies and economic relationships and arrangements aimed at enhancing and ensuring the due degree of products safety. In all the chain stages, adequate technologies are needed in order to carry out the productive process according to the best prerequisites identified by health and food sciences. Policy interventions intended to prevent food safety crisis have shaped the institutional environment of food systems channelling the companies strategies and have induced, with the technological requirements, the raise of complex organizational forms (Hobbs, 2002; Mènard and Valceschini, 2005). The food chain actors elaborate complex strategies in which technological and organizational choices and institutional commitments assure the food safety level demanded by public and private safety regulations and strategies.