Quality infrastructure refers to the technical institutions supporting global trade while ensuring consumers can purchase safe, healthy, high-quality products and services.
In recent years, scientific interest in quality infrastructure (QI) has grown continuously. The Google Scholar results from 1997 to 2024 confirm this trend.
Continue readingDigitalisation of accreditation services
Since 2020, accreditation bodies worldwide have increasingly digitalised their services. Accreditation has followed a universal quest for leaner and more efficient business processes, higher productivity, and lower costs. At the same time, digitalisation aims to improve the customer experience and communication as well as the transparency of the accreditation system.
Continue readingOne reason for investing in Quality Infrastructure (QI) is its contribution to a country’s economic growth. QI enhances economic performance through several avenues, including opening markets, reducing entry barriers, promoting knowledge transfer and better management procedures, facilitating production along value chains, enabling economies of scale, and reducing adverse selection and asymmetric information (Gonçalves and Peuckert, 2011). While interest in QI has been increasing over the years, QI experts, researchers and practitioners are challenged with quantifying the economic benefits of QI to highlight its importance and justify the need for investment and further development. So far, there have been various studies on the macroeconomic impact of individual QI components, such as standards, metrology and conformity assessment. However, an impact analysis for the entire system is still pending. This blog explores the methodologies used for the macroeconomic impact assessments of the different QI components and the possibility of conducting an assessment of the overall QI system.
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Quality Infrastructure for Development 