details above, the number of alerts per se, as a measure of ...nancing needs, is a very noisy proxy capturing both product and country characteristics. In a similar manner, the occurrence of noti...cations at the product level–count of existing SPS regulations–is poorly informative. It is an ex-ante measure, that does not re‡ect how the regulations are being managed in practise. By contrast, we consider the e¤ective product risk based on real food alerts at the EU border. The risk index measures how food safety regulations translate into inspections and rejections of non compliant shipments and thus how costly it may be to comply. In addition, no data on the costs of compliance at the product level, which would be the best proxy for capital needs, is available (section 2:2). The correlations between our risk index and those alternative measures are reported in Appendix 8:C. All coe¢ cients are below 0.35. The correlation between the number of public SPS noti...cations and the measure of sanitary risk is low. However this may be explained by the fact that the number of noti...cations is taken from Disdier et al., (2008) and is computed at the HS6 level, while our measure of risk is computed at the HS8 level. In addition, a lot of products have at least one noti...cation, while few products have a positive SRI.

Second, it is worth noting that our measure of risk, and therefore the need for ...nancing, is time invariant. Most probably this will not be the case in practise. However we verify that the ranking of agri-food sectors based on rejection occurrences is persistent over time<sup>8</sup> .

Finally, we ask the question whether the risk index computed using the EU market food safety requirements as a benchmark is relevant? The focus of the analysis is on public standards since the food alert database only reports shipments non compliant with the EU food safety regulation, and due to data limitations it was not possible to account for private standards in the empirical analysis. Private protocols play an increasingly important role in the governance of food supply chains. Public standards are becoming more performance and process based, they are developed to correct market failures, and therefore, tend to play a dominant role in preventing fraud and ensuring minimum standards for largely homogenous agricultural products. While, in many cases private standards build on the existing public standard infrastructure to provide an element of competition through quality di¤erentiation, as well as to facilitate e¤ective coordination in supply chains. Thus, a large share of the cost of compliance arise because of public regulations. Our risk measure while not accounting for private standard still captures the need for ...nancing to maintain access to developed countries’market. In addition, the EU regulation is in line with requirements set out by international standards as well as other domestic regulations–high income countries mostly. Besides, the EU is a major destination market for our African countries’export. It makes sense to account for requirements in this destination market. All together, this substantially supports our

> 8Although not optimal, this gives us some insight on how risk may evolve across sectors over time. The number of alerts at the product level is correlated at 75% across all years between 2001 and 2008.

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