Filtern
Dokumenttyp
Sprache
- Englisch (4)
Referierte Publikation
- ja (4) (entfernen)
Schlagworte
- Knowledge spillovers (2)
- Standardization (2)
- Factor analysis (1)
- Food standards (1)
- Harmonization (1)
- Innovation (1)
- Market access (1)
- Panel analysis (1)
- Patents (1)
- R&D (1)
The paper addresses the role of technical standards in bilateral trade relationship between the European Union (EU) and China. Traditional aggregate demand functions for imports and exports have been applied to estimate the effects of national and international standards. The panel dataset covers 14 years (1995–2008) and 36 two-digit technological fields based on the International Classification of Standards (ICS). The results indicate negative effects of purely national Chinese standards but positive effects of Chinese international standards for European exports. European standards and European standards aligned with international standards have a positive impact on exports and imports. Based on these results, we conclude that both China and the EU should increase their efforts to harmonise national standards.
Using a new database on standards in China, we estimate the impact of voluntary and mandatory standards – either harmonized to international norms or purely domestic – on Chinese food exports. The dataset covers seven Chinese products over the period 1992–2008. We find that standards have a positive effect on China's export performance, as the benefits to standardization in terms of reducing potential information asymmetry and signaling enhance food safety, and quality in foreign markets seem to surpass compliance costs. Our estimation results show that the positive effect of Chinese standards is larger when they are harmonized to international measures. The results suggest that there are clear benefits to China's steps to base their domestic standards and regulations on international measures.
This paper explores the decision of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to participate in official standard setting alliances. Based on micro data of German firms in the electrical engineering and machinery industry, we show that innovation-related variables follow the predictions of our hypotheses. Research and development (R&D) intensity exhibits an inverse U-shaped relationship on the likelihood to join alliances. The positive relation suggests that SMEs aim to access the knowledge of larger firms whereas the negative relationship indicates that SMEs exceeding a certain threshold of R&D activity are reluctant to participate in standardization because their knowledge is too essential to disclose to competitors. The importance to access external knowledge via standardization committees is underlined by a positive correlation with the relevance of incoming knowledge spillovers and a negative correlation with the relative size of companies' patent portfolios. Besides these variables, we also explore the traditionally considered factors for alliance formation and show that firm size and export intensity are positively correlated with participation.
In this paper, we identify the strategic motives of German manufacturing companies in the electrical engineering and machinery industry to be involved in standards development organizations. First, we present the general motives for the formation of strategic alliances and relate them to specific standardization motives. Then, we identify pursuing specific company interests, solving technical problems, knowledge seeking, influencing regulation, and facilitating market access as motives to standardize by means of factor analysis. In a second step, we test hypotheses on the relationship between the importance of strategic motives and firm level variables, e.g. R&D intensity, innovation activities, and firm size. The results reveal that firms in electric engineering and machinery have a particularly strong interest in ensuring industry-friendly design of regulations, which can be achieved by standards. Moreover, the results confirm that small firms also from these two sectors are active in standardization alliances to access knowledge from other involved stakeholders.