Building on Czubala et al, Shepherd (2007) examines the impact of internationally harmonized standards on the extensive margin of trade at the sectoral level. He suggests that although product standards have a negative impact on partner country export variety, international harmonization acts as a mitigating factor. The result is consistent with numerical simulations on a three-country version of Melitz (2003) model in which harmonization is beneficial at the extensive margin. The empirical results indicate that a 10% increase in the total number of standards reduces export variety by 6% meanwhile a 10% increase in the proportion of internationally harmonized standards leads to a 0.2% increase in export variety.

Finally, Moenius (2006b) is the only paper having focused on products that depend on electricity. He studies the different impacts of country-specific standards and standards shared by the exporting and the importing country. The author defines the latter as international harmonized standards and, in a gravity framework, concludes that both types of standards promote trade flows. He also finds that national standardization dominates bilateral standardization and that electricity-dependent products benefit more from international standardization than manufacturing products. At the empirical level, the fact that the base specification entails a regression of import flows on only dummy variables is worrisome.

# **3. The World Bank EU Electrotechnical Standards Database (EUESDB)**

The European Union Electrotechnical Standards Database (EUESDB) compiles European Standards for electrotechnical products<sup>12</sup> over the period 1990-2007, and maps them to the Standard International Trade Classification (SITC). The database provides counts of the number of standards and their relation with international principles. This section presents the methodology as well as some description of the standardization activity in electronic goods.

In an effort to increase the availability of empirical data on standards, the new EUESDB is based upon the methodology proposed in Czubala’s (2007) in assembling the European Union Standards Database in textiles, clothing, and agricultural products. Accordingly, the Perinorm database (www.perinorm.com) is used to extract the standards published by CENELEC. This approach has been employed previously in studies by Swann et al. (1996) and Moenius (2000, 2004, and 2006).

Perinorm is a subscription-only database of national, European and International product standards developed by the British Standard Institute (BSI), the _Association Française de Normalisation (_ AFNOR) and the _Deutsches Institut für Normung_ (DIN). It contains more than 1.1 million records from 23 countries, in addition to international bodies such as ISO and IEC and supranational organizations such as CEN and CENELEC. At this stage, EUESDB does not include data on national standards from individual EU member states<sup>13</sup> .

> 12 According to the IEC (http://www.iec.ch), the term electrotechnical refers to electrical, electronic and related technologies.

> 13 There are three reasons for this omission: First, a considerable number of national standards are in fact supranational standards implemented at the national level. Second, data availability varies considerably

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