Upfront efforts for upcoming benefits? ISO 9001:2015 certification and firms’ performance in 33 countries

This paper uses firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) for the years 2013 and 2019 conducted in 33 countries to investigate the effect of certification to an international standard on firms' performance. Unlike past studies that lumped together all international certificates a firm possesses before assessing its performance, we focus on the release of ISO 9001:2015 standard as a quasi-experiment and apply a kernel propensity score matching difference-in-difference method to panel data. We find that certification to ISO 9001:2015 increases firms’ total sales by 48.3 %. This effect is higher than the one obtained from previous studies that combined all international certificates (45.8 %). Results also show that small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), as well as firms in the manufacturing sector appear to benefit more from international certification. The study further suggests that cost reduction, direct international exports, foreign participation, and access to credit are key potential drivers of the positive effect of ISO 9001:2015 certification on total sales.