The economic and strategic impact of standards

Standards play an important role within society, shaping many transactions between consumers and companies, citizens and governments, as well as customer/supplier relationships in the broadest sense. This book investigates the economic and strategic importance of standards in a small, strongly globalised economy. The case of Belgium is developed from both a macro-economic and micro-economic perspective. Based on an econometric model, the macro-economic part quantifies the impact of standards on welfare creation, and provides an international comparison of similar studies. The micro-economic part reports the detailed results of a survey with more than 600 respondents and analyses twelve case studies from a multi-sectoral selection of companies, based on in-depth interviews. This multi-layered approach provides stakeholders with an interest in standardization with an encompassing analysis of the economic and strategic impact of standards.