The first line written by someone on Wikipedia says, ” An individual’s or a socioeconomic class’s standard of living is the level of wealth, comfort, material goods, and necessities available to them in a certain geographic area, usually a country. ” This article aims to define ” Standards of Living” which are in some ways linked with “Standard of Living”
The word “Standard” seems to have way too many definitions. I had created a slide to bring about the perspective few years ago in a technical workshop after reading around from the Internet; but I loved how BSI defined it here. Picking the lines I really liked, “….a standard is an agreed way of doing something. It could be about making a product, managing a process, delivering a service or supplying materials – standards can cover a huge range of activities undertaken by organizations and used by their customers.” and “They can make organizations more successful and people’s everyday lives easier, safer and healthier.“
The Testing Inspection and Certification Industry has evolved very rapidly in the last decade or so. Though the history can go back to more than a century or two for what the members of this industry do. SGS went public a year after I was born and joined the Swiss Market Index in 1985 as per someone who wrote on Wikipedia. Eurofins did an IPO in Paris in 1997 and then the secondary listing in Frankfurt in 2000. Intertek got on the London Stock Exchange in 2002. Bureau Veritas got listed in Paris in 2007