The Use of International Standards in Technical Regulation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To what extent are governments drawing on relevant international standards in their technical regulations, as mandated by the WTO TBT Agreement? A number of sources of data exist, including electronic databases maintained by governments, but they cannot be used to obtain systematic, international perspective, because there is no harmonised international format and they are incomplete. This study develops an analytical frame for collecting and presenting data on the use of standards in regulation in any sector, as a basis for effective monitoring of the actual extent of use of international standards in regulation and for empirical analysis of the trade effects. This template is then applied to collect and report for five OECD countries detailed factual information on technical regulations, their objectives and standards use in three sectors – electrical household appliances, equipment for natural gas and telephony. The research finds that core government policies confirm the receptiveness of policy and regulation to the use of international standards. It illustrates the difficulty of identifying, for a given sector, which standards are used, for which regulatory objectives, and with which links – direct or indirect – to standards used internationally. The data collected in the harmonised format of the template show how transparency of data on standards use could be improved. Improved transparency can facilitate efforts to improve harmonisation where this can help to remove barriers to trade. Explicit identification of regulatory objectives can ensure that attempts to promote wider harmonisation take account of those objectives. Also, the range of non-national standards actually used as a basis for technical regulation is greater than sometimes acknowledged, and wider knowledge of their availability and use could be helpful to regulators. Another benefit of transparency is that factual presentations of the use of standards in technical regulations provide a source of rich and accurate data for use in empirical work on how regulatory use of standards influences international trade.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.062 | 0.122 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.022 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".