The hypothesis that six EU Member States show a common behaviour on the implementation of food safety standards on fruit and vegetables imports is examined. To do so, we analyzed food border notifications recorded by the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF). Path dependence and reputation effects of past border notifications were explored for the whole period 2001-13, and for sub-periods 2001-07 and 2008-13. Negative binomial (NB) and zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) distributions were used to deal with over-dispersion and excess of zero counts. Our findings suggest that the EU cannot be considered as a single unit when non-tariff measures are studied, although there are some signs that Member State behaviour is becoming more uniform in the most recent period.

The aim of this paper is to identify the determinants of the rating assigned to sub-sovereign entities in Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, Italy and Spain, using a total of 92 territorial entities for the 1989-2012 period. Multinomial ordered probit estimation models were estimated for each specifi cation and agency.We conclude that the country's rating is one of the most important determinants of regional government's ratings with a positive infl uence (as expected), and that the country debt/GDP ratio is a stronger determinant for regions than their own indebtedness with a negative sign. Other relevant variables are population growth rate, unemployment rate, elderly people weight, regional public expenditure weight and size. Additionally, economic variables, such as country's rating and population growth are more important to Fitch; whereas budget variables and size variables are more relevant to Moody's. Debt variables and elderly people ratio are more important to S&P.

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