Global Advocacy - UNIDO

UNIDO advocates the development of a local conformity and compliance infrastructure by conducting cost benefit analyses on compliance services. These analyses compare the local and foreign costs of quality and safety compliance, and highlight the long-term advantages of investment in the establishment of a local/ regional conformity and compliance infrastructure.

With the objective of advocating for more effective technical assistance, and the design and implementation of tailored action plans for countries and sub-regions in the area of compliance services and infrastructure, UNIDO undertakes regional and national analyses to assess the priority needs for quality infrastructure upgrading. These analyses include data on quality infrastructure, in particular for African and Asian countries, and are used to advocate for the need for technical assistance in this area, both with developing countries and with donors.

Since 2010, UNIDO publishes a periodical Trade Standards Compliance Report (TSCR) to systematically examine the challenges that developing countries face with regard to trade standards and international market requirements, and to support technical assistance to overcome these challenges. It is funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) in partnership with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). The TSC analyzes rejections of developing countries’ exports at border entry to major international markets and provides estimates of the financial implications of non-compliance (“export losses”). The TSC analysis also assesses the exporting countries’ ability to detect and prevent non-compliance and the resulting export losses. For this purpose, UNIDO has developed and applied new innovative methodological tools, including a Quality Infrastructure (QI) survey and a corporate buyers’ compliance confidence survey. The TSC Report presents the results from these surveys which, together with the insights gained through the import rejection analysis, help to identify weaknesses in a country’s compliance capacity that it needs to address to fully exploit its export potential. These different methodological approaches and comparative analyses also allow for the benchmarking of compliance capacity across countries and regions.

UNIDO, in collaboration with the Institute of Developing Economies of the Japanese External Trade Organization (IDE-JETRO) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), engaged in a regionalized version of the Report for East Asia that can more strongly take into account regional conditions and specificities as well as intra-regional trade, thereby allowing the tailoring of policy recommendations to regional circumstances. It is intended to establish a series of such regional TSC Reports for Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

The TSC analysis aims to enhance transparency on trade standards and to increase awareness and understanding of present and future compliance challenges for developing countries. The studies undertaken in the TSCR can provide analytical support and inputs for the design and development of technical assistance projects and local or regional trade and compliance capacity-building programmes.

UNIDO’s flagship publication, its Industrial Development Reports, provide decision-makers in government and the private sector, the development community and scholars, with updated information and analysis on key trends, challenges, and opportunities in the world economy pertaining to industry and industrial development.