The Office of Standards and Intellectual Property (OSIP) Standards Team leads International Trade Administration (ITA) work on standards-related policy issues including those related to the standards development process, potential barriers to market access in global markets, and capacity building and efforts to promote regulatory cooperation to help ensure that regulations being promulgated by trading partners do not lead to trade barriers, and serves as the liaison to the American National Standards Institute, the coordinator of the U.S. standards system, U.S. Standards Development Organizations, and DOC's National Institute of Standards and Technology.
In working towards ITA's mission, OSIP actively engages private sector stakeholders—including individual companies, industry and trade associations, and standards developing organizations—as well as pertinent U.S. government agencies and foreign regulators.
News and Key Links
- Standards Alert is a service from OSIP in cooperation with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the private sector coordinator of the U.S. Standards system. Through Standards Alert, OSIP and ANSI want to make sure that ITA stakeholders know about opportunities to participate in standards development in organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). U.S. company participation is key to making sure that standards do not become trade barriers when incorporated into regulations by U.S. trading partners.
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Landmark study by ITA on the link between standards, regulations, and trade:
Standards and Regulations: Measuring the Link to Goods Trade finds that 92 percent of U.S. goods exports in 2015 (more than $1.3 trillion) were potentially affected by foreign technical regulations that could have a significant trade impact. Based on notifications under the WTO Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) agreement, the report also discusses industries that are frequently subject to regulation.
[ Full report ] [ Infographic summary ]
[ Video by ANSI that references the study ]
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Notify U.S. is a free, web-based information service managed and operated by Commerce’s National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). Notify U.S. is designed to disseminate World Trade Organization Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (WTO TBT) notifications. U.S. stakeholders can sign up for e-mail notifications of changes to domestic and foreign technical regulations for industrial products (including product packaging, marking and labeling) and receive complete texts of proposed regulations for review and comment.