Turning standards into a springboard for prosperity

The world runs on silent agreements. When they work, they go unnoticed: the socket that fits the plug, the kilogram that weighs a kilogram in Nairobi, Kenya, as surely as in Nagpur, India, the barcode that rings up a carton of milk or registers a container at sea. Standards, the shared rules that ensure consistency, compatibility, and quality, are not mere technicalities. They are part of the invisible infrastructure of modern economies, as vital to prosperity as roads, ports or power grids. Treat them as a springboard and they propel development. Make them into a straitjacket and they will stifle it. 

Our new World Development Report 2025: Standards for Development is the first comprehensive analysis of today’s global standards landscape. It asks, how can standards be harnessed to accelerate economic development? The report provides a practical policy framework for countries at all stages of development. And its lessons could not be more timely. Technological and geopolitical shifts are making standard-setting increasingly urgent. Artificial intelligence (AI), synthetic biology, and other fast-moving innovations are racing ahead of the world’s rule-making capacity. The result is a dangerous paradox: a cornucopia of standards for relatively inconsequential products, like packaged potato chips, and glaring gaps for transformative, high-stakes technologies like biotechnology and AI.  

Standards have proliferated in recent decades. Most international standards have been created since the turn of the century and non-tariff measures—often related to standards—now cover nearly all global trade. This increase reflects the complexity of supply chains, the digitization of commerce, and rising demand for safety and quality in high-income countries. Complying with standards, and shaping them, is now a prerequisite for export growth, technology diffusion, and resilient public services.  

Yet developing countries are often absent from the process of creating standards. On average, they sit on less than one-third of the technical committees that set global standards at the International Organization for Standardization and even fewer are in bodies that are not inter-governmental. This absence amounts to acquiescing to the priorities of advanced economies. When lower-income countries do not participate, they relinquish vital opportunities to advance their own priorities and lose crucial avenues to speed up job creation and economic growth. 

Voluntary standards, mostly industry-led, can spread good practices in flexible ways. Mandatory standards, embedded in government regulations, can protect health, safety, and the environment. Blending mandatory and voluntary standards—and tiering them by the capacity to comply by risk—can maximize efficiency while safeguarding the public interest. Tiered standards can also widen participation: small firms can start at a basic tier and climb upward, rather than face a compliance cliff that only dominant incumbents can scale. 

To turn standards into a springboard, governments of developing countries must resist the urge to overregulate and instead focus on building the foundations that enable higher quality. This includes improving their “quality infrastructure,” which comprises metrology (the existence of reliable and internationally aligned measurements), conformity assessment (testing, inspection, and certification), accreditation (“checking those who check”), and standardization itself. When this system works well, businesses and consumers need not worry about everyday routines. Firms can concentrate instead on demonstrating quality at a reasonable cost. Consumers can trust what they buy. Regulators can focus on outcomes. 

Avoiding the straitjacket requires matching ambition with capacity. Regulators might be tempted, for instance, to copy the most stringent international pollution standards to signal seriousness. But standards that exceed a country’s capacity to comply are a recipe for uneven enforcement, rampant corruption, and market concentration. Where capacity is strong, governments should raise their ambition and align with global norms. Where it is weak, they should adapt standards to local realities while instituting mechanisms to build capacity over time.  

Countries—and sectors within them—should chart a realistic trajectory for standard-setting that matches their stage of development. Our report proposes a progressive framework to do this: adapt, align, author. For countries at an early stage of development, where compliance capacity is typically low, the smartest course is to adapt international standards to domestic conditions. At more advanced stages, countries should aim to align their markets with international standards. And at every stage, countries should author international standards in priority areas where they have built expertise. That means showing up in committees, commenting on drafts, and convening domestic stakeholders so learning flows in both directions.  

At the same time, higher-income countries and international bodies should create seats at the standard-setting table for low-income countries—and provide the support they need to succeed. They should cut duplication in the notorious “spaghetti bowl” of overlapping voluntary standards and cooperate internationally to minimize divergence, especially where public interests are shared and the costs of fragmentation are high. In frontier technologies, leading economies should press their top firms to set baseline standards and stress-test them with diverse stakeholders before markets harden around proprietary defaults. 

This is vital because standards are how societies make the unseen obvious and governable. Standards reduce transaction costs, diffuse know-how, and enable scale. In low-trust environments, they substitute for reputation; in high-tech ones, they are the only way complex systems interoperate safely. Done well, standards lower entry barriers, expand opportunity, and protect the vulnerable. Done badly, they entrench incumbents and stymie progress. 

Developing countries are in a race against time. Several middle-income countries have set their sights on becoming high-income within a generation. To succeed, they must run a relay. Standards are the baton, passed from lab to factory to regulator to border and back again through feedback and learning. When standards are designed and implemented effectively, the whole team runs faster.