ISO 14001 and international trade

The purpose of this paper is to study potential association between international trade and ISO 14001 certification. The study is based upon a search conducted by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) performed in 2013, which includes responses from 110 countries in 11 languages. At this time, among all topics from the research, the variables studied were motivations for implementation and the benefits achieved. These data were crossed with features of international business trade to identify its real outcome. The null hypothesis to be tested is that there was no correlation or association between international trade and the studied variables. Results show that there were 16 weak correlations between motivations to implement ISO 14001 and international trade. The survey result shows that there are weak correlations among countries international trade and motives to get certification. Because the degrees of correlation are low, there is reason to further studies, what could probably include multivariate techniques. Anyway, the study suggests that some of the expected results and benefits for the business were not achieved or were achieved at degrees lower than expected in countries where trade is higher. Regarding motivations to implement the survey confirmed that attending to customers’ and stakeholders’ interests is an important driver for companies that export.