Club of bologna proceedings

Jean Marie DEBOIS 
Just a small comment - I tried to be too short 
before. I should have mentioned that Russia, 
China and India - three large countries - also 
belong to the OECD codes. And indeed I think 
the way you put the question is quite valid. The-
re is the competitive distortion, to be technical, 
between countries who subsidise and those who 
don’t subsidise the testing and certification ac-
tivities.
 
Sandro LIBERATORI 
I would like to answer the question which was 
put before, concerning the problem that when 
you get a machine, it may be different from the 
machine that has been tested. Of course we will 
try to describe the machine as exactly as possi-
ble, in order to make it easy to recognise whe-
ther the machine you have in your country is the 
same as the machine that has been tested. Of 
course we cannot set up a system to check all 
machines everywhere. But we can provide a tool 
to help you recognise the machine.
 
Pierluigi FEBO 
Italy 
I have a question - I would like to hear more 
from the manufacturers, about what they really 
think of this certification activity. Because my 
previous experience of sixteen years of testing at 
the university of Milan, both for the OECD co-
des and the official Italian government, tells me 
that sometimes the manufacturers see this te-
sting activity as time-consuming, expensive, and 
so on. What do they really think of this certifica-
tion activity?
 
Jean Marie DEBOIS 
I have an example from two weeks ago. There 
was a call for tenders for tractors from Paki-
stan. I won’t tell you which countries were in-
volved in that, but a key issue was whether the 
tractors had been OECD tested or not.