Background
Point of departure: Rapid increase of significance of consumer policy
The profile of consumer policy has risen in the recent past like few other policy areas. The liberalisation of markets has increased consumer choice. Due to globalisation, products are produced internationally in complex supply chains. By means of their buying decisions, consumers directly impact working conditions and environmental standards in the production of goods. Demographic changes have led to a withdrawal of the state from the provision of essential services. As a consequence, consumers are increasingly responsible for their social welfare. In addition climate change concerns place pressure on consumers to alter their consumption patterns. Together these developments result in a situation in where consumers have greater responsibility in their buying decisions.
During the 1980’s and 1990’s politicians assumed that the shift in responsibility from the state to markets would increase consumer welfare. Today they increasingly recognise, however, that the state continues to have a duty to put a framework in place to empower consumers to make responsible purchasing decisions. The more choices consumers have and the more responsibility consumers should take for themselves, the more consumers require support in their decision-making. - Consumption should not be a full-time job.
Deficits: Current consumer policy has a weak theoretical foundation
While the profile of consumer policy has risen in the last few years, there remain a number of considerable deficits:
Consumer policy research is fragmented. Almost all research that deals with consumer policy focuses on singular consumer issues and problems within an academic discipline or specific market. The result is that questions about the institutional design of consumer policy (the governance of consumer policy) and questions that do not relate to a single market (such as financial services or nutrition), remain insufficiently addressed. Examples of such horizontal or cross-cutting issues include limits to information or transparency based approaches, tools to support consumers in the jungle of products, and pay schemes and instruments to facilitate sustainable consumption.
- Consumer policy research is insufficiently evidence-based and does not sufficiently differentiate between consumer groups. More than ever consumer policy research has to answer the question to what extent different consumer groups (such as singles, families, pensioners, high income/ low income consumers) benefit or lose on the way from the welfare state to welfare markets. Furthermore, it is imperative that consumer policy research is substantiated by facts and attempts to quantify the damage caused by insufficient consumer policy.
- Consumer policy and consumer research are nationally oriented. While production and trade are globalised, consumer policy and research are generally nationally oriented. Because companies increasingly operate cross-border, such a national orientation is inappropriate. Furthermore, a national focus limits the productive exchange with regard to consumer policy problems and solutions.
ConPolicy - the Institute for Consumer Policy - addresses these deficits with a holistic, global, evidence-based approach.