Today is the World Standards Day.

In the current world standardization comes as an increasingly important matter in ensuring the sustainable development of the economy and science and technology and improving people’s material and cultural lives.

According to data available, many countries require different standards of their goods for international trade. This gives rise to inevitable obstacles in goods export, disrupting the balance in international payments.

In this context standardization organizations, both international and regional and bilateral and multilateral, strive to facilitate the assessment procedures of standards and their appropriateness in all countries.

The International Standards Organization (ISO) has set the subject for the World Standards Day till 2030 as Shared Vision for a Better World and called for every member state to increase the use of international standards and take an active part in the cooperation in standardization.

In line with the international trend of the development in standardization the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has directed efforts to improving standardization so that it can contribute to the stable and sustainable development of the economy.

The country has worked out sector-specific system chart for standardizing all objects and factors in the economic and other social fields and on the basis of this, worked hard to implement it.

It ensures that machine-building, light-industry, chemical, agricultural, electrical, electronic and various other sectors of the national economy set up and renew the methods of marking the sizes of goods on packaging designs according to international criteria.

It also newly established and introduced standards that would contribute to the modernization of industrial establishments and environmental protection: it renewed the standards of tractors and other farming machines and essential consumer goods, while putting emphasis on their quality control.

It has also chosen the objects that need fresh standardization of natural disaster response, land and environment and tourism and introduced relevant standards to meet its specific conditions.

It has strengthened the examination and checkup of standard application through regular survey of the standardization in the capital and regions.

It has improved the quality indices and expanded the objects to be standardized by introducing the international standards of different fields such as ISO 16000 serial standard (indoor air), ISO 17000 serial standard (conformity assessment), ISO 55000 serial standard (asset management), ISO 9241 serial standard (ergonomics of human-system interaction) and the national standards of foreign countries as suited to its local conditions.

Along with this, it has sponsored yearly training for enhancing the working ability of personnel engaged in standardization and disseminated the data from international and national magazines devoted to standardization as well as sector-specific and regional standards through information and communications networks.

Ro Kwang Jin