New book suggests ways to maintain consumer safety in a globalized world.
The University of Pennsylvania Press has just released the book, Import Safety: Regulatory Governance in the Global Economy, which addresses the unique regulatory challenges of protecting consumers from unsafe products in an era of globalization. Governments around the world increasingly face new regulatory challenges because of expansive growth in trade and rapid changes in technological and economic conditions. Each year, more food, drugs, and other goods move across national borders than any single government entity alone can inspect and test. Government officials must try to regulate an expanding set of manufacturers and suppliers abroad, and hard economic times only accentuate the competitive pressures that lead firms to cut corners on safety.
Rather than accepting the status quo, Import Safety presents and analyzes new ways of deploying traditional regulatory resources as well as innovative proposals for rethinking regulatory governance in an era of expansive international trade. The book grows out of a conference organized by the Penn Program on Regulation, and held at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, in the spring 2009 that attracted leading scholars in law, economics, political science, and risk analysis. For more information, visit the book’s website.
