Firm’s Compliance Behaviour Towards Food Fortification Regulations: Evidence from Oil and Salt Producers in Bangladesh

Abstract

Impact of national food fortification programs is contingent on the extent to which there is compliance with national standards. However, this compliance is often sub-optimal and is not consistently measured. One of the challenges to more regular measurement is an over-reliance on quantitative assessments of micronutrient levels for compliance, which are costly. In resource constrained environments, this contributes to weaknesses in regulatory monitoring. We offer an alternative, systems-based approach to determine compliance, presenting a unique score that can capture firms’ compliance behaviour, based on whether and how firms actually carry out stages of the fortification process. The key utility of such a measure being its use to monitor fortification propensity and assess changes in response to interventions. Further, we present an empirical application of this measure, providing novel evidence on firms’ compliance towards food fortification regulations in Bangladesh, investigating the institutional and firm-level factors that correlate with compliance behaviour towards food fortification regulations among edible oil and salt producers.