among CENELEC members<sup>8</sup> to comment on the draft. After the comments are incorporated into the document, a final draft is sent for vote. At this third stage members’ votes are weighted according to the size of the country they represent. The approval of a standard requires that a majority of the national committees voted in favor of the document and that at least 71 percent of the “weighted” votes cast are positive.

At the global level, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is the organization that prepares and publishes international standards for electrical, electronic and related technologies. Table 2 reports the procedures to formulate IEC standards. It follows a similar procedure to standards formulated under CENELEC, however, the voting procedure occurs not only at the approval stage but also at the enquiry stage between qualified members. In some instances there is a join effort between IEC and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to publish standards related to this sector.

Table 2 here CENELEC standards can be divided into three groups according to their relationship to international principles (IEC standards): i) standards identical to international norms, ii) standards based on international norms but modified with some specifications added for the European market, and iii) purely European standards. For this study, we only differentiate between CENELEC standards identical to IEC standards (internationally harmonized) from those that are not (non-internationally harmonized). By 2007, 70.1 percent of CENELEC standards (3,704) were internationally harmonized<sup>9</sup> whereas the remaining 22.7 percent were not (1,200).

For example, EU standard EN 61300 is an internationally harmonized standard in electronics that is identical to IEC 61300, which outlines the general requirements for optical fiber interconnecting devices and passive components. By opposition, standard EN 50049-1/A2, which delineates the interconnection requirements for domestic or similar electronic equipment, is a purely European standard since there is not an international norm equivalent to it.

# **2.2. Internationally Harmonized Standards and Global Trade**

The literature about the effect of harmonization standards on international trade is limited<sup>10</sup> . Until recently, the literature was concentrated on examining the commonly held view that block-harmonized standards encourage international trade and that

> 8 Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and  United Kingdom. 9 CENELEC facts & figures, as of January 2008.

> 10 The role of product standards –or more generally, technical barriers to trade (TBT)–, on international trade is also recent. At the theoretical level, Baldwin (2000) and Ganslandt and Markusen (2001) propose an analytical framework to understand the role of TBT on international flows. At the empirical level, Wilson and Otsuki (2004), Blind and Jungmittag (2005), and Chen et al. (2006) have estimated the impact of product standards or the effect of their liberalization. WTO (2005) provides a complete overview on the relation of product standards and international trade.

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