ABSTRACT
When the European Economic Community (EEC) agreed to create a single market for goods and services, they commissioned a review of barriers to trade. This review identified national standards as the most important technical barrier to trade. Most national standards tend to have a combination of performance and prescriptive requirements. For example, British cement standards have performance requirements for strength and prescriptive requirements for constituents. Harmonisation of standards is extremely difficult when they are based on prescriptive requirements. Therefore the Commission and CEN requires harmonised European standards to be expressed, as far as possible, in terms of product performance.
