Citizen Complaints, Regulatory Violations, and their Implications for Swine Operations in Illinois

In this paper, statistical and economic analyses are used in identifying, analyzing, and modeling the relationships among citizen complaints, swine production and community characteristics, EPA inspections, and regulatory violations. The primary results of this research include assessments of factors that affect citizen complaints and factors that affect the probability of regulatory violations. In addition, the analyses also provide statistical results of a comparison of the efficiencies of different types of site inspections in regulatory violation detection. Our results provide information valuable for understanding issues surrounding the development of the swine production industry and local communities.