Private Requirements by European Retailers : Impact on French Exporters

Based on recent development of international economics, this paper aims to evaluate in what extent private standards impact trade, and more precisely trade of French agrifood firms. Our paper explores an original "handmade" database identifying French agri‐food firms which are certified with the International Food Standard – IFS– and/or the British Retail Consortium standard – BRC. From this dataset, one can analyse the characteristics and the export behaviour of certified firms compared to that of the non certified ones. First we look at the productivity of the firms; second, we look at export behaviour of the firms: does a certification such as BRC imply export orientation of the firm? Then we propose the stimation of Chaney’s model (2008) to test for the impact of certification on trade costs faced by certified firms to access EU markets. Our preliminary results show that certification clearly impacts French firms. In the case of BRC certification, we especially show that French certified firms significantly decrease their fixed costs to access EU markets