The results of our study can be summarized as follows. We
find a positive average impact of food standards on household
wellbeing: applying standards leads to an average increase in
monthly per capita consumption expenditure of about 50%
in our most conservative specification. When we allow for
varying impacts across the expenditure distribution, we find
small and insignificant effects for the poorest half while there
are large positive effects for the upper middle-class, defined
as households from around the median of the distribution
and upward, but excluding the upper 10–15% tail. The gain
for the upper middle-class is an increase in consumption
expenditure of around 65% in our most conservative estimation.
While the insignificant impact of standards on the poorest
half of the farmers is clearly the main result, the
insignificant impact of adopting standards for the 10–15%
wealthiest farmers is also interesting and we argue that the
finding is not simply a statistical coincidence. The estimated
distribution of the impact of adoption of standards is the outcome
of two different conditions: (i) for the poorest farmers
there is no gain because of the high costs of financing the
investment, and (ii) for the wealthiest farmers there is no gain
because they are already able to get high prices on their fish,
partly because they produce fish of high quality and partly because
they have good working relations with the processors.
The overall outcome is that application of food standards in
the Vietnamese pangasius sector is benefitting the upper middle-
class directly, while the benefits for the poorer segment are
either absent or, at best, second order labor market effects as
described in Maertens and Swinnen (2009) and Colen et al.
(2012).