"Since the establishment of product safety as a new policy field in the middle of the twentieth century a variety of instruments for the ensuring and controlling of the safety of technical consumer products have been developed. The author analyses these instruments and their specific characteristics, describes their strengths and weaknesses and examines their mutual relationships. He departs from the identification of risks, which arise from technical consumer products, using for this purpose several available statistics and pertinent empirical studies. In a second step he analyses how these data are being evaluated from different viewpoints and hence can bias the assessment of the safety of a product. This dependence determines yardsticks of product safety policies and their implementation. The critical analyses of the particular functions, strengths and weaknesses of these instruments reveals, that the coordination of the instruments of product safety policies and their implemented has remained unsatisfactory."

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