Strengthening the Compliance of the OIC Member States
to International Standards
56
notified 41 STCs under the TBT Agreement and 29 under the SPS Agreement. (Some notifications
involve more than one country.) Of the OIC regional groupings, the Arab and Asian countries have been
approximately equally involved in STC notifications under the TBT Agreement; African countries have
only made a handful of notifications. Under the SPS Agreement, the Asian group is by far the most active
in terms of STC notifications with 18, as compared to the African group’s 9 and the Arab group’s 5. While
a lower number of notifications for the Arab group is consistent with their comparative advantage in
non-agricultural sectors, the result for Africa stands out. In practice, it is unlikely that this pattern of
notifications indicates that compliance problems are less in Africa than in either of the other two groups.
Rather the lack of African notifications is likely symptomatic of capacity difficulties in terms of
identifying measures with a trade impact, and assessing their effects on local industry.
In terms of products covered by STC notifications, considerable variation is notable. For TBTs, the
product categories listed are sometimes very wide (e.g., “industrial products”), but it is important to
note, as previously emphasized, that potentially problematic TBTs include those that deal with primary
sectors, particularly food. Chemicals and energy products are also signaled a number of times, as are
tobacco products. In the case of SPS, food sectors are again critical, with a number of notified measures
having broad application to all food products, or a large sub-sector, such as fresh fruits and vegetables.
Clearly, the choice of products and measures to be made the subject of an STC notification is in part a
function of the characteristics of the country submitting it. The product distribution therefore reflects
the export interests of the complaining countries, in addition to the potential restrictiveness of the
standards in question.
STC notifications can also be analyzed from the perspective of the countries targeted as having
potentially problematic measures. For TBT notifications, OIC member states overwhelming see the EU
as having potentially restrictive standards: 19 notifications relate to that region. The second most
commonly identified region is the USA, but with only five notifications, it appears to be viewed as a less
restrictive TBT environment than the EU. In the case of SPS measures, the EU again stands out with 12
STC notifications, compared with only 2 for the USA. Australia, which is widely regarded as having very
strict standards in the SPS area, has five notifications—a considerable number given that it is not a large
export destination for OIC member states outside Asia.
Taking all of this information together, it is clear that the STC data provide an important gloss on the
information coming from NTM Map: although OIC member states are affected by many standards in
sectors of key export interest, only a very small fraction are actively perceived as overly restrictive, in
the sense of being problematic from a WTO standpoint. Of course, countries do not necessarily notify all
problematic measures, as that depends on information flow from the private sector, as well as public