Strengthening the Compliance of the OIC Member States
to International Standards
9
2 WHY DO INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS MATTER FOR OIC COUNTRIES?
This section provides an overview of standards, and highlights the reasons why international standards
matter for OIC countries. For a full description of the issues involved in the standards and trade nexus,
see Shepherd (2014), upon which this section draws.
2.1 Introduction to Standards and Quality Infrastructure
Standards are documents setting out requirements that products, services, or systems must meet in
order to be considered as conforming. Conforming to a standard delivers a benefit in the marketplace, as
it signals to the consumer or other user that goods, services, or a company’s systems are of a particular
level of quality and consistency. This report will focus on product standards, which deal with the
characteristics of products. The term product standards is a broad one, covering mandatory and
voluntary standards, whether they are issued by a public or private body. As such, the discussion here
covers technical regulations, a term used in the WTO agreements to indicate a product standard that is
mandatory and issued by a public body.
Historically, each country has issued its own standards through national standards bodies, some of
which are public sector entities, and some of which are private sector associations. The trend in the
developed world is increasingly towards letting the private sector decide on its own standards, except in
core areas of regulatory competence such as health, consumer protection, and the environment.
Standards designed to meet other needs—such as interoperability of electronics products—are typically
a private sector affair.
Another distinction in the standards literature is between mandatory and voluntary standards. A
company must comply with mandatory standards before it can sell its goods in a particular market. By
contrast, it is free whether or not to comply with voluntary standards from a legal standpoint, even
though compliance may be a commercial necessity, particularly when dealing with large distributors
(wholesalers and retailers), which need products of consistent characteristics and quality. Again, there
is a clear trend in the developed world towards the use of voluntary rather than mandatory standards,
because the former leave greater scope for innovation in the market place, and are less cumbersome to
update and reform than mandatory standards. So the domain of application of mandatory standards has,
in the developed countries, typically shrunk to cover core aspects of health, safety, and consumer
protection.
Standards are one part of a country’s quality infrastructure. A number of other elements are also
necessary to ensure that the standards system works well and is effective in achieving its goals of
improving the quality and consistency of production. On the one hand, testing laboratories are needed to