Modelling of ISO 9001 certifications for the American countries: a Bayesian approach

Abstract

ISO 9001 is a certifiable international standard issued by ISO (International Organization for Standardization), focused on continuous improvement. The adoption of ISO 9001, through regression models, is usually related to macroeconomic factors, and the literature indicates that it also relates to governance and sociocultural factors. In 2017, the American continent presented 33.5% of world GDP and contained 7.9% of ISO 9001 certifications issued worldwide. The objective of this paper is to verify the influence of macroeconomic, sociocultural, and governance factors on the number of ISO 9001 certifications in the countries of the American continent. Bayesian statistics were used to analyse the distributions of the coefficients of determination and for a more realistic interpretation of the parameters. The sociocultural and governance factors inspected were significant nine times in seven models selected for the seventeen American countries evaluated. These relationship implications between the researched factors and the adoption of ISO 9001 are in line with the literature and presented a general pattern. The relationships detected can be used to understand better the diffusion of ISO 9001 in the American countries, in addition to presenting new possible factors that can influence the business environment and economy of the countries.