Conclusions

In this article, it has been demonstrated that, world-wide, the expansion of the ISO 14000 standard has followed a very similar pattern of diffusion to that of the ISO 9000 standard. The ISO 9000 standard, much more popular and older, is at 68.7% of its saturation point which will presumably be reached towards 2007.

The ISO 14000 standard, which began to be implemented some years later, is spreading at a much greater speed, although with the same pattern of growth: the pattern established by the logistic curve. For this reason, currently, it has already almost reached the same relative level as ISO 9000 and is forecast, according to the model proposed here, to reach 95% saturation in 2006.

We can therefore say that, according to the model proposed, both standards have reached an important
moment in their maturity. Also, when we analyze the presence of these standards in the different economic sectors, more signs of their maturity are to be seen. On the one hand, both are developing towards smaller indices of concentration and, on the other hand, there are fewer and fewer fluctuations in the sectors’ positions in the rankings of certifications (the rates of instability for both standards tend towards smaller values). From the analysis of individual countries, we also observed that in the United States, there is still a long way to go before the ISO 14000 standard begins to fully mature.

We can conclude from this study that both standards spread in similar ways among the economic sectors:
those sectors that were leaders or pioneers in the introduction of the ISO 9000 standard, have played similar galvanizing roles in the case of the ISO 14000 standard. We can therefore confirm the hypothesis established by some authors, according to which the unprecedented surge in the progress of the ISO 9000 standard has been an important factoring explaining the surge in the ISO 14000 standard, an hypothesis already partly confirmed by a study of a more general nature by Corbett and Kirsch (2001).