Research

Measuring the impacts of Quality Infrastructure: Impact Theory, Empirics and Study Design (April 2011)

This study, which resulted from a research project commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), aimed to assess the impacts that quality services contribute to improve the understanding at the political, entrepreneurial and academic levels about the relevance of quality infrastructures to the functioning of innovation systems, how they enhance the performance of economic agents and improve the outcomes of social, economic and environmental policies.

The key objectives aimed to identify the following positive areas:

• the identification of the range of positive and negative effects that they have in societies;
• to advise policy makers on how the accomplishment of their strategic goals may be facilitated through the development of quality services;
• To raise awareness of consumers, firms and industries about the existence of such an institutional complex, i.e. how it shall be used as a platform where various economic agents are to participate and interact in order to address to a multitude of social, economic and environmental challenges;
• to learn ways of improving the functioning of the existing quality infrastructure.

A copy of the report is available on the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) website.