Government regulations, institutional choices, and market effects — Take China's compulsory certification system as an example

摘要

The Sanlu milk powder scandal occurred in China in 2008 aroused great international attention to China''s quality certification system. This paper studies the current China''s quality certification system and points out the fact that the regulatory role played by the Chinese government is practically a monopolized function to “certification” supply. This paper takes China''s compulsory product certification as an example and adopts market concentration index CRn and H index to verify this sort of monopolization. The validity of certain compulsory product certification is also verified by random inspection of their acceptability. The results of this study indicate that there is a negative market effect with the current China''s quality certification system, which results in higher rate of acceptability of non-compulsory certified products than the compulsory certified products.