The Trade Standards Compliance Footprints (TSCFs) represent country fact sheets and are another element of UNIDO’s endeavor to disseminate the insights gained through its analysis of developing countries’ trade standards compliance challenges.
Each TSC Footprint gives a snapshot on economic, social and particularly trade-related facts for the country in question (for a more detailed explanation of the rationale and structure of the TSC Footprints, take a look at this brochure). While the emphasis is on indicators for trade standards compliance capacity derived from import rejection data, each TSC Footprint also presents some information on the country’s economic and social structure and poverty characteristics as well as on the trends, composition and direction of its agri-food exports. Broadly speaking, each TSC Footprint comprises four sections with the following logic:
By offering such a quick overview, the TSC Footprints aim at policy makers and seek to provide them with a simple decision-making support tool to inform and guide their setting of priorities when it comes to trade capacity-building and investments in the development of their country’s quality and compliance infrastructure. In particular, the TSC Footprints allow for a comparison across countries and they enable trade standards stakeholders like policy makers, donor agencies, and technical cooperation organizations to benchmark a country’s trade standards compliance performance against that of its peers in the same region or income group.
In a first step, UNIDO has produced such TSC Footprints for a limited number of countries and focusing only on import rejection analysis (which provides just one of various perspectives on trade standards compliance challenges and capacity). As a consequence, the availability of such rejection data was the key criterion for selecting the countries so that this first series of TSC Footprints was established for those countries that have been most affected by agri-food import rejections during the past couple of years. Moreover, while the present collection also includes a few low-income and high-income countries, the focus is on middle-income economies.
TSC Footprints can be downloaded as a collection or individually for the following countries:
Papua New Guinea
Republic of Korea
Trinidad and Tobago
A collection of all TSC Footprints in one single document can be downloaded here