This report aims to review those international standards-setting organisations that are of greatest interest to developing countries and to assess ways in which developing country participation can be enhanced. It focuses on five international standards-setting organisations that are of primary inte...

A growing concern over health risks associated with food products has prompted revisions in sanitary and phyotsanitary standards in industrialized countries. This paper quantifies the impact of standards on aflatoxins implemented by the EU on food exports from African countries. We employ a gravity-...

This paper examines the importance of standards in influencing whether firms in developing countries export opportunities agricultural and food products. Overall, the authors demonstrate that more stringent SPS standards in importing markets have a negative effect on developing country firm expor...

Sustainability standards are gaining in importance in global markets for high-value foods. While previous research has shown that participating farmers in developing countries may benefit through income gains, nutrition impacts have hardly been analysed. We use survey data from smallholder coffee fa...

Compliance with public and private food safety standards has been the subject of increasing attention. Much of the literature on impacts of food safety regulation in developed countries focuses on public health. In poorer countries, the emphasis is on economic development. How standards shape access...

Several studies have examined the determinants of training in developing countries but only few have paid attention to the potential importance of international standards such as ISO 9000 or ISO 14000 on the firm's training decision. This paper examines training determinants using recent employer su...

This paper provides empirical support for the view that international harmonization can reduce possible negative impacts of product standards on developing country exporters. It focuses on the extensive margin of trade (new products), asking whether harmonization can promote an increase in export va...

The article identifies the main causal mechanisms that link sustainability certification to local food security. Existing evidence points to a positive, albeit weak and highly context-dependent, relationship between certification, farmers' income, and local food security. Certification's ...

There is a growing body of literature that analyses the implications of private food standards for developing countries. Most of this literature has focused on the trade effects of standards and on the effects on exporters and producers. Very few studies have looked at the effect of standards for wo...

Millions of smallholder farmers in developing countries participate in different types of sustainability standards. A growing body of literature has analyzed the welfare effects, with mixed results. Yet, there are important knowledge gaps. First, most existing studies have looked at the effects of o...

Standards and technical regulations exist to protect consumer safety or to achieve other goals, such as ensuring the interoperability of telecommunications systems, for example. Standards and technical regulations can, however, raise substantially both start-up and production costs for firms. For th...