The published version of the original paper entailed a mistake in one index of the socalled legal dimension of consumer policy, which is one dimension out of four to measure the consumer policy performance of 28 EU member states (legal, enforcement, social and associational dimensions of consumer policy). This note describes the mistake and presents the results based on corrected data. The revised results are very similar to those originally reported and do not affect the overall argument or the article´s original contribution to existing research.

Corrigendum: “Consumer Policy in 28 EU Member States”. COPO 19–00032 2019.

The original paper introduces four dimensions of consumer policy and proposes a new methodology to measure levels of consumer protection in the 28 EU member states. Based on clearly defined indicators and a range of empirical data, the article measures the level of consumer protection in the legal, enforcement, social, and associational dimensions of consumer policy. In the original paper, there was a mistake in the subindex of the legal dimension. This note describes the mistake and corrects it.

The calculation of the 'price protection index' for the 28 EU member states was incorrect. Given that the “price protection index” represents one out of five indices to measure what I call the legal dimension of consumer policy, the associated “legal protection index” must also read differently. The correct results are presented in Table 1.

Table 1 Legal protection indices and overall legal dimension index (author’s own summary based on EU 2017a, b)
Full size table

A comparison of the results in Table 1 with the results published in Table 5 of the original article shows that France now scores best on the “legal consumer protection index” (8 points), while Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal and the UK follow closely (7 index points), scoring best among the 28 EU member states. Overall, the main results, comparing countries with similar legal traditions (e.g., Germany, Austria; both 3 points) or from the same geographic region (e.g., Eastern Europe; Iberian Peninsula), score the same or almost identical values, consistent with the original analysis. The same is true for the “regime tests” carried out to determine the existence of possible consumer policy regimes, as suggested by previous research (Repo and Timonen 2017). While the calculations based on the corrected data, of course, differ from those reported in the original paper, again, the main conclusion with regard to this aspect of the paper remains the same: The data do not support the existence of consumer policy regimes in the legal dimension of consumer policy from a spatial (H = 5.479; p = 0.137), temporal (U = 73 000; p = 0.274) or “institutional” (H = 6.396; p = 0,171) view.

The reader should note that the corrected results of the legal consumer protection index also apply to the values reported in the summary of the legal dimension in the discussion and conclusion section. I am grateful to a colleague who drew my attention to this mistake, and I apologize to the readers and the journal editors for this mistake. The main conclusions of the article—its proposed dimensions of consumer policy, the novel methodology and the results of the consumer protection performance of the 28 EU member states—are still of the same value after the correction is reported in this note.