Do similar standards of product safety lead to similar levels of consumer safety? In 2007, more than 19 million toys worldwide were recalled for violations of applicable safety standards. Following these recalls, both the EU and the US instituted new policies governing children’s products: the US Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA) and EU 2009 Toy Safety Directive. The relevant toy safety standards that emerged from this legislation, such as ISO (ISO 8124), US (ASTM F963), and EU (EN 71) standards are comparable in terms of their language but not their results. Using a data set profiling implementation of EU and US conformity assessment systems for determination of product safety for toys manufactured in China, we find that weighted recall totals for violative products are between 10 and 20 times higher in the EU than the US. This suggests that differences in the implementation of global standards result in more unsafe products initially reaching consumers in some locations.
Points for practitioners
Government officials should avoid assuming that safety begins and ends with international standards. The process for verifying that products meet established standards is as important as the standards themselves, and it can have significant economic and safety impacts The choice of conformity assessment system for a given product or market is driven by many considerations, including appetite for risk, political institutions and practice, and variations in national-level administrative capacity. Discussions on the merits of any conformity assessment system for a given market, or product, should incorporate all of these factors.
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