Consumers' Trust in Government and Their Attitudes Towards Genetically Modified Food: Empirical Evidence from China

Understanding the determinants of consumer's acceptance towards genetically modified food (GMF) is critical important for future biotechnology development. Among many factors, consumers' trust in government has increasingly received great attentions in the literature. However, accurately quantifying impact of consumers' trust in government on their GMF attitudes is difficult because researchers often encounter many difficulties in empirical estimation. Overall goal of this study is to empirically quantify the impact of consumers' trust in government on their attitudes towards GMF in China. An econometric model on consumer's trust in government and their attitude towards GMF is developed and estimated based on a unique data set collected by the authors in 2002 and 2003 in 11 cities of China. This study shows that the consumers' acceptance of GMF is high in urban China. Among many factors, consumers' trust in government is found to have significantly positive impact on their acceptance of GMFs, which has important implications for any government who wants to pursue the development of GMFs. Our study also shows that fail to consider the endogeneity of consumers trust in government will lead to serious underestimation of its impacts on consumers' acceptance of GMFs. This is, as the best of our knowledge, the first study on the impact of consumers' trust in government with consideration the endogenous problems that are often embodied in the consumer perception studies.