How does biotech food labelling affect consumers’ purchasing preferences and the market? Evidence from urban China

This paper examines whether and how biotech labelling has had an impact on Chinese consumers’ vegetable oil purchasing decisions. The authors used sales data from Nanjing and household survey data from Jiangsu province. They found that the market share of biotech oils immediately decreased as a result, though the decrease was small in absolute terms (but statistically significant). In addition, the changes in the biotech oil market share were affected by the structural effect of the rich, while there was no apparent gross consumption effect of the poor, which could have been underestimated due to a series of factors concerning the two datasets applied.