International Standards and National Specificities in Large Economies: USA, China and EU

International Standards have seen for the past decades one of the most pronounced increases in adoption and usage across the globe. As International Standards become not only an indicator of the quality of economic processes deployed, their spread signals the level of integration in the world markets as they align to common practices. In this paper, I explore the dynamics of International Standards’ adoption over the past decade, and the way in which these have been developed and adopted. I focus especially on regional differences, in the case studies of the largest economies today: USA, China and the EU. I show how sometimes national standards prevail over international standards, and how this is an instrumental tactics for meeting protectionist objectives. A specific case study in the field of international standardization studies the medical standards that benefit from the additional oversight of an International Organization (i.e. World Health Organization (WHO)). WHO has provided unitary guidelines of implementation across the globe, and has furthered significantly the homogeneity in this particular field.