The World Bank has urged developing countries to play a more deliberate and strategic role in shaping global trade standards, warning that the fast-growing web of international rules increasingly tilts the balance in favour of advanced economies and large multinational corporations.

In its World Development Report 2025, the institution argues that standards, spanning food safety and labelling, digital technologies, environmental compliance and telecommunications now constitute a form of economic infrastructure as vital to development as roads, ports and power systems.

According to the report, standards have been instrumental in reducing transaction costs, harmonising markets and facilitating the expansion of global trade.

However, it cautioned that they are also being deployed with increasing frequency as non-tariff barriers, often entangling developing economies in complex and costly compliance regimes.

The World Bank noted that such measures now affect about 90 per cent of global trade, a dramatic rise from just 15 per cent in the late 1990s, underscoring the growing influence of standards in shaping who gains — and who loses — in the global marketplace.

Highlighting the historical impact of standardisation, the report cited the shipping container as a powerful illustration of how common standards can unlock efficiency and growth. By enabling seamless transportation across borders, containerisation did more to expand global trade than decades of tariff-cutting agreements combined. Since the early 2000s, however, the report observed that standards have increasingly been leveraged to advance strategic, economic and geopolitical interests.

Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics, Indermit Gill, described standards as both central to modern economies and frequently overlooked in development debates.

“When they are set right, they fade into the background of everyday life,” Gill said. “The ship sails through the canal, the building withstands an earthquake, and a kilogram weighs the same in Kenya as in Canada. Countries that actively adapt, align with and author standards can turn them into powerful tools for growth, productivity and poverty reduction.”

The report revealed a sharp surge in the global appetite for standards. Of the more than 20,000 standards issued by the International Organization for Standardisation (ISO) over the past seven decades, over half have been developed since 2000. In 2024 alone, standard-setting bodies worldwide issued more than 7,000 new standards, reflecting the rapid pace of technological change and regulatory expansion.

Despite this growth, the World Bank warned that developing countries remain significantly under-represented in the institutions that draft and govern global standards. Limited financial resources, technical capacity constraints and weak institutional frameworks have constrained participation. On average, developing countries take part in fewer than one-third of ISO technical committees, with representation even thinner across other international standard-setting bodies.

Secretary-General of ISO, Sergio Mujica, said the decision to dedicate the 2025 World Development Report to standards sends a strong message that standards are no longer invisible or purely technical instruments, but critical enablers of inclusive and sustainable development.

“Unlocking the full development potential of standards requires ensuring that all countries can meaningfully participate in their creation and implementation,” Mujica said. “This report is a timely call to deepen global cooperation and level the playing field in standard-setting.”

To help countries harness standards as engines of development, the report proposed an “adapt-align-author” framework. At early stages of development, countries are encouraged to adapt international standards to local conditions, rather than automatically adopting the most stringent global benchmarks that may be costly or impractical.

As institutional capacity strengthens, countries should progressively align with international standards to ease access to global markets, reduce duplication and lower compliance costs for businesses. Crucially, the report stressed that alignment should go hand in hand with more active engagement to ensure that emerging global standards reflect national and regional priorities.

For countries that attain higher income levels and stronger technical capabilities, the World Bank recommended a shift towards authoring new standards or updating existing ones, thereby influencing the direction of global trade and innovation.