In this paper we examine the incentives for governments to recognize the standards of foreign products. In the case of non-recognition, a foreign firm must incur an additional cost to sell in the local market. In the benchmark case, we assume that governmental policy is limited to either (1) recognizing all foreign standards or (2) not recognizing any standards. We then enrich the model and investigate whether countries can gain by forming blocks (standardization unions) which entail mutual standard recognition among member countries.