Evaluating the performance of protected designations of origin and protected geographical indications: a multi-criteria approach
Author(s)
Galli, Francesca
Date Issued
March 28, 2011
Type
Doctoral Thesis
Abstract
Geographical Indications of origin (GIs) are increasingly being adopted as
public policy in the European Union for the identification of typical food products
in the form of Protected Designations of Origin (PDOs) and Protected
Geographical Indications (PGIs). In recent years substantial interest has emerged
in improving this policy in order to encourage the adoption of PDO/PGI schemes
as well as to enhance their effectiveness.
The increasing number of PDO/PGI recognitions (over one thousand at the
beginning of 2011) and the ongoing overhaul of these policy schemes at the
European level, make the assessment of the actual performance of the PDO/PGI
policy a critical task for the revision and improvement of the policy itself.
However, due to the dearth of official information, the deeply different production
and marketing conditions among PDO/PGI products, and the variety of
stakeholders involved, a comprehensive approach for the assessment of the
impacts of PDO/PGI schemes in terms of achievement of their objectives is
missing.
We contribute to the assessment of PDO/PGI schemes by building an
approach to measuring the actual performance of the PDO/PGI products in
relation to the objectives of the European Regulation 510/2006. We do this
through a multi-criteria ex-post analysis that compares the performance of
different PDO/PGI products with respect to multiple criteria. The present work
develops a comparative evaluation of the performance of 31 Italian PDOs in the
cheese sector and 30 Italian PDO/PGIs in the e-v olive oil sector: i) relative to the
different objectives of the schemes, ii) by using a set of suitable indicators that
inform on the effectiveness of a wide number of PDOs/PGIs with respect to the
regulation’s objectives, and iii) by considering the priorities of the different actors
involved in PDO/PGI schemes, with regard to the importance of different
objectives.
Results obtained in the two cases analyzed are consistent. We evidenced a
trade off among the performance on the objectives which suggests a possible
underlying contradiction of the policy itself: a success on the marketplace is not
iii
necessarily contributing to higher returns to producers placed upstream in the
supply chain of the sector and vice versa, a stronger market power to producers,
also in terms of relevance on the territory, is not in line with a good performance
on the market. Although there are exceptions to this trend, the trade off at issue is
indicative of a general ambiguity in the PDO/PGI policy and it reflects two
opposite feasible strategies, practicable within the different PDO/PGIs. Moreover,
the policy maker scenario simulated in the two cases showed an overall higher
performance of smaller PDOs, well rooted on the territory of origin, targeted to
niche market segments, for both the cheese and the olive oil sectors. On the
opposite, lower ranked PDOs tend to be larger (in terms of turnover, quantity and
area of production covered), well established in the wider markets through large
distribution systems. The evidence that smaller PDOs are performing, on the
overall, better than the bigger ones, is somehow surprising and not trivial:
nevertheless a better performance of small PDOs, especially in the baseline
scenario, seems to be coherent with the Policy makers perspective.
Multi Criteria analysis is a promising approach to evaluating the
performance of PDOs/PGIs. A “well aware” use of a Multi Criteria technique can
be useful for the assessment of the performance of PDO and PGI schemes, to
allow to gain insights on the cases of success (i.e. the best practices) and the
conditions of the most effective realizations of the schemes, providing a support
to the policy maker for the future revision of the policy.
Additional information
Dottorato di ricerca in Economia e territorio
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