Markus J. Reigl is Head of Technical Regulation at Siemens AG.
| Siemens AGWe were actually on the right track. The establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994, together with the TBT Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, advanced global free trade. As the most significant tariff barrier, average duties between industrialized countries steadily declined to below 3 percent. Or so it seemed. The renaissance of mercantilism – driven by the rediscovery of tariff policy as a geopolitical weapon – has brought this development to an abrupt halt.
But it is not only tariffs imposed at the whim of political leaders that complicate global trade. Technology embargoes, export controls, quantity restrictions, and sanctions regimes add further obstacles. The prevailing dynamic is increasingly one of every nation for itself – the replacement of multilateralism with intergovernmental anarchy. Had Dante Alighieri known the modern export manager, he might well have reserved a special circle of hell in his Inferno for today’s international trade professionals.
Technical regulations are also among the non-tariff barriers to trade: legal requirements that products must meet in order to be lawfully placed on a target market. In principle, such technical barriers – national conformity assessments, certifications, and standards – were meant to be eliminated under the TBT Agreement. In practice, however, a shift away from multilateralism is evident here as well. The willingness to adopt international standards unchanged into national frameworks is declining, as is the readiness to reference such standards in national regulations that determine legal market access.
When asked for reasons, governments often cite protective objectives such as consumer safety, environmental protection, and data privacy, along with country-specific conditions that supposedly make international standards “not applicable” domestically. Standardization organizations must respond to this trend.
Instead of relying on blanket standards based on a “take it or leave it” approach, international standards should be divided into a universally applicable core – reflecting consensus on fundamental aspects – and annexes containing necessary country-specific deviations, all within the same international standard. This would remove the rationale for refusing adoption or reference. Adoption rates would rise, and the global harmonization of market access envisioned by the TBT Agreement could be realized.
This alone will not transform Dante’s Inferno into a paradise for export-driven economies – but it would certainly help reduce the nightmares.
