Local Regulatory Strength and Transparency in China's Food System

In order to determine the relationship between food safety and local regulatory strength in China, our researchers have mapped the regulatory organizational structures in China to develop transparency indicators for each prefecture. Researchers created a set of wholesale market regulation indicators to measure the strength of prefecture level regulatory intent on wholesale markets. To map these indicators, we used machine learning and our mapping was based on automated text recognition algorithms applied to over 400 related government websites between 2008 and 2017.