REGULATORY HARMONIZATION AND TECHNICAL STANDARS IN MERCOSUR

Abstract

With thirty years of life, the Mercosur has accumulated information and experiences that should be used to guide its development in the decades to come. If the results may not have met the most optimistic expectations, Mercosur continued to exist and to remain faithful to its founding objectives: the creation of a free trade area and the sub-regional customs union in South America. The accumulated experience in harmonizing regulations and technical standards, a condition for overcoming technical barriers to trade and making productive integration feasible, is quite substantial. The results obtained in terms of competitiveness and trade could have been better, but the challenges were greater. Macroeconomic instability as well as the historically poor infrastructure and structural differences between partners were the main obstacles. The similarity in the government’s collaboration with the private sector in the countries that integrate the bloc was essential to the stability of the practices and actions that took place in the three decades of Mercosur, in the area of regulations and technical standards.

Keywords

• mercosur
• trade agreements
• productive integration
• technical regulation
• technical standard
• regulatory harmonization