This book is global in its coverage and in its creation. Standards and value chains are rapidly spreading across the world, as we document in the book. While much of the creation of this book was centered in the LICOS Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance at the University of Leuven in Belgium, it was inspired by empirical research in various parts of the world and enhanced by discussions and collaborations with researchers from many institutions around the globe.

Our first encounter with the importance and the role of standards and value chains (or supply chains as we referred to them then) in development was in the transition world. In the early 1990s we witnessed an unexpected economic collapse in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: output was falling and productivity was going down in country after country that embarked on the road to a market economy. The things that were going up were unemployment and poverty.

Then, rather suddenly, things turned around. One of the first sectors to turn around was the sugar sector in Slovakia. Following up on discussions at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Expert Group on Transition we carefully analyzed the transformation of this sector and discovered the crucial role that the supply chain restructuring process and the introduction of various standards had on productivity and output.

These insights triggered us to embark on a large set of value chain studies, at LICOS and later at the World Bank. The empirical research started in Eastern Europe (with field research in, e.g., Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Albania); later we extended our analyses to Asia (in China in collaboration with CCAP; in India in collaboration with the International Food Policy Research Institute [IFPRI]) and to Africa (e.g., in Madagascar, Senegal, Benin, and Ethiopia).

Our empirical findings and those of others suggested quite heterogeneous impacts and effects that were not captured or explained by traditional economic models. It became obvious after some time that our difficulties with interpreting the various findings were partially due to the absence of a good theoretical framework. We started developing conceptual frameworks to model the processes that we observed, derive hypotheses, and use these to improve our future empirical work and enhance the interpretation of existing empirical findings on value chains and standards.