Consumer Product Safety Standards and Conformity Assessment: Issues in

The expansion of international markets in consumer goods has been accompanied by two concerns. How can consumers be sure that the products they purchase meet exacting safety standards? And how to insure that standards do not act as barriers to trade. To answer these questions, the OECD Committee on Consumer Policy engaged in an extensive survey of manufacturers, distributors, and government regulators to discover the major issues and attitudes towards problems in this area. The results of this survey are contained in this publication. The publication concludes that duplicative testing requirements often provide no further guarantee of safety instead, they merely increase costs and delay the introduction of products to the market. It suggest increased use of internationally accepted performance-based standards, mutual recognition of the procedures other countries use to insure conformity with their standards, and more transparency in safety requirements to make sure standards are not used for anti-competitive purposes.