As industry has moved to integrate and consolidate manufacturing, the application of domestic-centric regulations can engender unnecessary and duplicative actions and costs across sectors. In this article, the author draws upon lessons learned from the Canada-US regulatory cooperation effort to examine the opportunity that regulatory cooperation provides to rationalise the array of overlapping international regulatory systems going forward, and the role that trade agreements can play in facilitating this occurring . Without question, there has been a shift away from domestic production to one of greater regional supply chain integration and global value chains , including an increasing trend towards global products, those being manufactured to the same standards and through the same technologies throughout the world. This poses a significant challenge for domestic-centric regulations in an increasingly global production and manufacturing reality. Applying multiple country requirements on individual integrated supply chains results in unnecessary and duplicative actions and costs. An individual supply chain is subject to each of the government’s requirements. They all intend to provide the same regulatory outcome, but they are doing it independently. The trend toward globalisation of value chains is apparent across all sectors, albeit at different speeds and levels of evolution. Because the airline...
Written by Robert Carberry