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North-South Standards Harmonization and International TradeRecent years have seen a surge in
 economic integration agreements (EIAs) and the development
 of non-tariff measures (NTMs). As a consequence, a growing
 number of EIAs include provisions on NTMs. However, little
 attention has been given in the literature to the effects of
 NTM liberalization in the context of EIAs. In this paper, we
 focus on provisions for technical regulations and analyze
 whether the North-South harmonization of technical barriers
 affects international trade. Using a gravity equation, it
 tests whether, as a result of the deep integration
 associated with standards provisions included in the EIA,
 the Southern partners' trade expands with the North,
 but at the expense of their trade with non-bloc Southern
 partners. Empirical results provide strong support for this
 conjecture. Moreover, harmonization on the basis of regional
 standards negatively impacts the exports of developing
 countries to the North.
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Quantifying the Impact of Technical Barriers to Trade : A Framework for AnalysisThere has been increasing use of
 technical regulations as instruments of commercial policy in
 the context of multilateral, regional, and global trade.
 These nontariff barriers are of special concern to
 developing countries, which may bear additional costs in
 meeting mandatory standards. Many industrial and developing
 countries express frustration with regulations that vary
 across their export markets, require duplicative conformity
 procedures, and are continually revised to exclude imports.
 The authors provide a comprehensive overview of the policy
 debate and methodological issues surrounding product
 standards and technical barriers to trade. They begin with a
 review of the policy context driving demand for empirical
 analysis of standards in trade, then provide an analytical
 overview of the role of standards and their relationship to
 trade. They then review methodological approaches that have
 been used to analyze standards and their impact on trade.
 Their main interest lies in advancing techniques that are
 practical and may be fruitfully extended to the empirical
 analysis of regulations and trade. They discuss concrete
 steps that could be taken to move forward a practical,
 policy-relevant program of empirical research. Such steps
 would include: a) administering firm-level surveys in
 developing countries; b) devising methods for assessing how
 much standards restrict trade; and c) establishing
 econometric approaches that could be applied to survey and
 microeconomic data, to improve understanding of the role of
 standards in exports.
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Indicators to Monitor Regional Trade Integration in AfricaMore than 350 Regional Trade Agreements
 (RTAs) are currently in force and more than one-half of
 global trade is carried out under preferential terms. A
 strong set of results based indicators can help to
 illuminate the costs and benefits of policy initiatives and,
 thus, inform the broader public dialogue on complementary
 reforms. The following discussion takes stock of the
 monitoring practices in Africa with respect to regional
 trade initiatives and evaluates the need for further
 indicator development. The assessment thereby focuses on the
 downstream outcomes of existing trade commitments and the
 measurement of how regional trade policies affect ordinary
 traders, producers, and consumers. This spotlight on
 impact-monitoring for the general population also helps to
 establish whether decision makers have the necessary tools
 at hand to evaluate the linkages between regional trade
 arrangements and poverty reduction. This paper is divided
 into following sections: section one gives background and
 motivation for the analysis; section two briefly discusses
 integration monitoring systems and related indicators in
 general; section three presents an overview of regional
 trade indicators that are currently used by policy-makers in
 sub-Saharan Africa; section four surveys the respective
 monitoring practices in other regions of the world; and
 section five provides suggestions for indicator development
 in Africa based on the practices and gaps identified in the
 earlier parts of the report.