Acceptability of measurement standards and calibrations from foreign countries

The standards of measurement maintained by national standards laboratories in the metrologically more advanced countries may safely be regarded as equivalent for the vast majority of practical applications. In each country industrial laboratories are encouraged to ensure that their measurements have proper traceability to their own national laboratories, and this should in principle ensure compatibility between industrial measurements made in different countries. The compatibility of the measurement systems of different countries is being increasingly questioned, however, as trade in high-technology products and co-production of sophisticated devices increase. Manufacturing companies with excellent measurement accreditation in their own country are being asked to establish direct traceability to foreign standards of measurement and, in effect, to bypass their own national measurement systems. Although a degree of cross-checking and redundancy is always a valid precaution in metrology, the situation should not be allowed to get out of hand. In the case of Australia, requirements for our manufacturers to establish traceability to other than the Australian standards cannot be technically justified except in rare instances. It would be a costly imposition on manufacturers to require them to establish direct traceability to the standards of every country with which they have contracts. Unwarranted requirements for traceability to foreign standards are contrary to the 1979 GATT Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, and tend to undermine the domestic national system of measurement.