Services Standards: Defining the Core Consumer Elements ... - ANEC

Hans-W. Micklitz
triggered action at the GATT 286 level 287 . ANEC and Consumers International are
participating in ISO and IEC. At the EC level, ANEC ensures timely consumer
input into standardisation and related policy debates. The current study
commissioned by ANEC complements ISO/IEC Draft Guide 76. Whilst the latter
is addressed to practitioners, the ANEC study may be regarded as more of an
academic exercise.
b) Business induced consumer services
Once this gap is closed, the point remains that standardisation of services is
very much determined by business interests. At first sight the interests of
business can be easily identified. Broadly speaking they could be grouped
around three areas:
• Tourism; tour operators and travel agents, recreational activities such as
diving, language tours,
• Elderly people, housing and care,
• Transport and furniture removal.
Tourism is big business today. Standardising definitions, providing ground rules
for tour operators, travel agents and language tour operators and securing the
safety of, for example, diving activities through appropriate education fit very
well into a consumer society in which travelling combined with leisure activities
have gained such an importance that standards increase the economies of
scale in this business sector.
Europeans are getting older and have less children. Society is under change.
More and more people retire at an age where they are still in a position to
organise their lives themselves. At the same time, they intend to take
precautionary measures which allow them to feel safe even if they need more
and more help in the daily organisation of their households. It is here where the
projects on standardising services tie in. They all deal in some form or the other
with the elderly as market citizens who request services, to be paid out of their
pensions or assets. The relevant initiatives, however, are taken at the national
level, not at the European level. The reason could be that the pension systems
are still national and that the majority of the elderly return home when they need
support and care. However, the number of Europeans who do not want to stay
in their home country and who seek to spend the third age in the warmer part of
Europe is steadily increasing. European law has substantially contributed to this
286 GATT – General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, see http://www.gatt.org/.
287 See Micklitz, Internationales Produktsicherheitsrecht, 1995, pp. 257 et seq.
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