Food Safety Satisfaction in China and Its Influencing Factors: Empirical Study with a Hierarchical Linear Model

Food safety is one of the residents' initial demands in daily life, and the negative perception of food safety potentially leads to public panic and dissatisfaction with government performance. Existing literature only focused on certain regions in China by using different indicators, and their results varied and lacked comparability. This paper explores influencing factors of the public's satisfaction with food safety by conducting a nationwide survey in China. Factors cover several demographic variables while considering the nature of governments to reveal the difference among provinces. The results show that demographic factors such as gender, age, type of residence, education, and census register are positively correlated with food safety satisfaction, while annual income is not significant. Evaluation of government regulation efforts has a positive correlation with food safety satisfaction. People with higher trust in the government show higher satisfaction with the food safety situation. On the province level, per capita GDP, per capita food safety fiscal expenditure, and food safety fiscal expenditure level are positively correlated with food safety satisfaction. The empirical findings are helpful for government regulations; we thereby discuss our analytical results and suggest some governmental policies.