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Global standards now affect almost 90% of world trade, up from 15% in the late 1990s.
The World Bank warns they are widening inequalities between advanced and developing economies.
EU’s CBAM climate policy places heavy reporting burdens on low-income exporters.
Developing nations have minimal representation in standard-setting bodies such as ISO.
Without greater participation, poorer countries risk costly technological lock-ins and reduced policy autonomy.
A fast-growing web of international standards, governing everything from food labels and cargo containers to electric-vehicle chargers and 5G networks, is quietly reshaping the global economy while widening inequalities between rich and poor nations, according to a new World Bank report.
The World Development Report 2025: Standards for Development, released on December 11, 2025, has offered a comprehensive examination of how global standards are written, who writes them, and who ultimately benefits. It highlighted how standards underpin nearly every aspect of modern life and enable markets to expand, with demand rising sharply. In 2024 alone, major international standard-setting bodies issued more than 7,000 new standards, according to the report.
At a time when trade frictions are intensifying and tariffs are increasingly used as protectionist tools, standards, in the form of non-tariff measures such as requirements for product labelling and safety testing, now affect nearly 90 per cent of trade, up from 15 per cent in the late 1990s, said the report.
While standards have become as essential to economic prosperity as highways and ports, the report warned that they also create a huge imbalance between developed and developing countries.
One of the clearest examples is the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which the World Bank said risks widening the global divide. The CBAM imposes a carbon price on imports across six sectors: Cement, aluminium, iron and steel, fertilisers, hydrogen and electricity. This will ensure that firms exporting to the EU are held to the same emissions reduction requirements as European producers. For this, global firms must measure, report, and verify the emissions their products cause, in accordance with established standards.
To comply, companies must measure, report and verify plant-level emissions in line with established standards. Where credible data is not provided, default EU emissions values, which may overstate actual emissions, are applied, the report noted.
However, enterprises in less developed countries often struggle to meet the stringent reporting and verification requirements. For example, Mozambique, which sends nearly 90 per cent of its aluminium exports to the EU, and Egypt, a major supplier of nitrogen-based fertilisers, face particular vulnerabilities under the new rules.
The report highlighted a significant disparity in who shapes global standards. Historically, developing countries have been passive “standard takers,” largely excluded from the decision-making processes that determine the rules governing trade, technology, and environmental policies.
High-income countries participated in 84 per cent of all active technical committees at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), while low-income countries were involved in only 7 per cent. This imbalance extended to representation at key meetings, where advanced economies sent an average of 525 delegates to ISO meetings each year while low-income countries sent just nine, lower-middle-income countries merely 14, and upper-middle-income countries just 65.
“Not enough developing countries are at the table when standards are written — because they often lack the resources and expertise needed to participate. On average, they sit on less than one-third of the technical committees that determine global standards at ISO, and even fewer in other bodies,” the World Bank said.
This lack of involvement meant that many international standards were developed without adequately reflecting the needs, challenges, and priorities of developing countries.
“But with massive technological changes underway, developing countries risk being locked into costly or ill-fitting technological trajectories and relegated to reduced policy autonomy if they remain passive adopters of standards created by advanced economies and multinational corporations,” the report said.