Regional agreements on standards have been largely ignored by economists and unconditionally blessed by multilateral trade rules. It is theoretically and empirically found that such agreements increase trade between participating countries but not necessarily with the rest of the world. Adopting a c...

A compilation of submissions to the Workshop and Policy Dialogue organized under the auspices of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Federal Ministry of Economics and Labour and Inwent (Capacity Building International, Germany) in Berlin, Germany on 21-22 November 2005...

The book provides information, and guidance for policymakers, the development community, and others in the critical area of "behind the border" barriers to trade. With a view to promoting efforts to strengthen Africa's capacity to meet trade standards, and comply with technical regulations, the book...

In the search for alternative markets in face of globalisation, the export of environmentally friendly and socially preferred goods and services from the South is increasingly sold as a developmental ‘win-win-win’, providing trade opportunities which can simultaneously alleviate poverty and protect ...

The use of standards and technical regulations as instruments of commercial policy in unilateral, regional, and global trade contexts has increased as tariff and quota barriers continue to decline (Maskus and Wilson, 2001). Standards and technical regulations are principally used to mitigate food, a...

This paper analyses the effects of standards on UK trade performance. The results suggest that UK strength in standards improves the UK trade balance, but can also act to make the UK market more open. The results also contradict two common views of the effects of standards: first, that standards act...

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...

The paper analyses the effects of patents as indicators for innovations and standards on the German-French trade flows. The results show that primarily Germany's innovative capacity can explain its export performance in France and not its strength in standards. Second, the stocks of international st...

Nowadays, the impact of the measurement and testing infrastructure on economic performance and trade is theoretically and even politically widely accepted. However, there are no empirical studies on this issue. The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the impact of innovative capacity and technical...

This paper examines the choice between alternative trade‐based approaches to reducing global environmental damage, such as trade‐related process standards and tariff‐based approaches. Estimates of the effects of alternative policies are presented, using a calibrated global trade model with pollution...

There has been increasing use of technical regulations as instruments of commercial policy in the context of multilateral, regional, and global trade. These nontariff barriers are of special concern to developing countries, which may bear additional costs in meeting mandatory standards. Many industr...

The goal of this paper is to help set a research agenda for examining the effect of compatibility barriers to trade. The paper explores the relationship between compatibility standards and international trade flows from an industrial organization perspective. I provide a brief survey of the literatu...

International product standardization enables traditional, price-based competition. But the existence of redesign costs or network effects creates market frictions that diminish the incentive to standardize if there already exists a different technology in an established market. This leads to multi-...

Developing countries face an increasing need to upgrade the standards of their domestic markets and of their exports. This paper examines different approaches available to them for upgrading their standards and conformity assessment procedures. It focuses particularly on those followed within the co...

Several studies investigating the trade effects of standardization have found a positive impact of the number of international standards in a country on its trade volumes. While international standards have so far been considered as exogenous, we investigate what drives countries to take over lea...

Cross-border trade of Services has attracted the attention of industry, policymakers and academia. Whereas the trade of goods has been well analysed both from the theoretical and empirical perspective, investigations into the trade of Services are only beginning. In particular, the complex influence...

The effects of patents as indicators for innovations and standards on German trade performance are analysed in general and German–British trade in detail. The latter analysis goes a step further than the approach of Swann et al. (1996) and is based on a broader and more detailed database. The result...

Greater trade integration has often been viewed as requiring greater standardization in institutions, without which the benefits of trade do not materialize. There are many current debates concerning the degree and area of standardization needed and these debates are likely to continue for the fores...

This chapter mainly focuses on the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) standards. Companies generally voluntarily adopt those in order to carry a "social" license to operate, as today it is the way to underline their good governance credentials. In transboundary trade t...

While much of the focus of the economics literature has been on the role of public food safety and quality standards both as policy instruments and as non-tariff barriers to trade, it is evident that private standards are playing an increasing role in the governance of agricultural and food suppl...