Metrology’s Impact on Global Trade

It used to be politics that governed the relationships between nations.  Increasingly today trade and the workings of the global economy, engines of wealth creation, shape the way nations relate to each other.  Seven thousand or so years ago, the recording of trade transactions was an important contributor to the development of written language and about that time too we saw the beginning of simple systems enabling sellers and buyers to agree on the quantities of the items they were trading.

We’re a long way from those times, but it isn’t a great intellectual stretch to understand how the modern versions of those two simple tools support today’s global trade.

Trade is the lifeblood of today’s global economy and all trade requires agreement between sellers and buyers.  Metrology, measurement, is at the core of all trade.  It is the trust and assurance informed by accurate measurement that enables trade to occur, whether that trade be in vast quantities of sophisticated manufactured items between international corporations in different parts of the world, or between an individual and his or her butcher for a steak for the evening’s dinner.

When it comes to global trade, it is the relatively recent development and broad acceptance of an integrated and effective global measurement system, starting with the oversight of the International Conference of Weights and Measures (CIPM) and working its way down eventually to manufacturing, service, regulatory and governance organizations wherever in the world they may be, that enables today’s vast flow of goods and services to take place.  Competent measurement programs assure that parts and services provided in one geographic location, by one or various suppliers, will in concert result, in another part of the world entirely, in products and services that fit together and/or work as intended by their designers.

Competent and harmonized measurement programs don’t just spring out of the air.  They have been made possible by the development and operation over the past 150 years or so of an increasingly well implemented world-wide metrology system.

Without great metrology, modern global trade would be impossible.