A Centennial of Anti‐dumping Legislation and Implementation: Introduction and Overview

A century has passed since the Government of Canada adopted the first recorded anti‐dumping law in 1904. The Canadian legislation was soon followed by similar legislation in most of the major trading nations in the industrialised world prior to and after World War I. Anti‐dumping provisions were later incorporated into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) following World War II. Nowadays, virtually all of the industrialised and developing countries in the world economy have adopted anti‐dumping legislation. In view of the long and increasingly widespread use of anti‐dumping measures, we marked the centennial of Canada's 1904 legislation with a symposium at the University of Michigan on 12 March, 2004. The symposium papers document the experiences with anti‐dumping and then ask whether and how anti‐dumping can be reformed. Although we all would probably agree that the best solution would be to retract all anti‐dumping legislation, this is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. Anti‐dumping laws serve a variety of purposes, and powerful political forces stand in the way of eliminating these laws. Anti‐dumping provides a stronger and more focused means of safeguards protection against surges of imports than GATT‐legal safeguards laws permit. Anti‐dumping also formalises a meaning for ‘unfair trade’ that, though essentially meaningless from an economic standpoint, strikes a chord in public perception. And finally, in spite of its appearance of being constrained by objective administrative rules, anti‐dumping in practice is a potent political tool that governments are able to manipulate in order to satisfy powerful constituents. With all this going for it, anti‐dumping is unlikely ever to be relinquished as an economic policy tool by governments.     

Anti‐dumping Protection in a Liberalising Country: Mexico's Anti‐dumping Policy and Practice

The use of anti‐dumping policy has been steadily growing in recent decades, and so has the theoretical and empirical literature on anti‐dumping. However, while developing countries as a whole have become at least as active as the ‘traditional’ anti‐dumping regimes (the USA, the EU, Canada and Australia), the literature is almost exclusively concerned with the latter group. This article gives an overview of anti‐dumping policy and practice in Mexico, one of the leading ‘new’ anti‐dumping regimes. It assesses how anti‐dumping has expanded since the country began liberalising trade in the mid‐1980s, and discusses how the policy has been applied in a protectionist way that is not dissimilar to policy practice in the traditional user countries.     

Canada's Anti‐dumping and Safeguard Policies: Overt and Subtle Forms of Discrimination

Like many countries in the international trading system, Canada repeatedly faces political pressure from industries seeking protection from import competition. I examine Canadian policymakers’ response to this pressure within the economic environment created by its participation in discriminatory trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In particular, I exploit new sources of data on Canada's use of potentially WTO‐consistent import‐restricting policies such as anti‐dumping, global safeguards and a China‐specific safeguard. I illustrate subtle ways in which Canadian policymakers may be structuring the application of such policies so as to reinforce the discrimination inherent in Canada's external trade policy because of the preferences granted to the United States and Mexico through NAFTA.     

Some Remarks on Reforming WTO AD/CVD Rules

In these remarks, I argue that a plausible reason that anti‐dumping actions are so widely abused for protectionist purposes is that they represent a rare instance of essentially unilateral actions that are permissible within the WTO: under the banner of anti‐dumping actions, governments can block imports and provide their industries with import relief without fear of retaliation or demands for compensation from their trading partners. Cognisant of the great potential for abuse of anti‐dumping actions, the WTO Agreement on Implementation of Article VI represents an extraordinarily detailed attempt by WTO member governments to ‘reign in’ this potential through a detailed set of rules governing the acceptable methodologies and procedures for initiating anti‐dumping actions. But as long as the underlying incentives for abuse remain, governments are likely to continue to find new and increasingly ingenious ways to respond to these incentives without running afoul of the rules. To create incentives for the use of anti‐dumping measures that are more in line with a cooperative international environment, I suggest extending WTO compensation provisions to cover anti‐dumping actions. In this way, the WTO might in effect ‘harness retaliation’ and convert it into a tool of international order in the area of anti‐dumping actions.     

Product Heterogeneity and Cost Allocations in Contingent Trade Protection

The WTO allows members to impose contingent protection, including anti‐dumping duties, within agreed constraints. Anti‐dumping proceedings typically name a single captioned product but include large numbers of individual products within that caption. The inclusion of multiple products creates a variety of issues for both anti‐dumping and other contingent protection measures, issues that have been prominent in national actions and WTO dispute settlements, but have been largely ignored in research. This work focuses on the most important such area, the allocation of costs among products in anti‐dumping proceedings. We develop a comprehensive economic analysis for cost allocation issues, and couple it with the accounting tools that must be used for its implementation, to derive the first‐best allocation methods for anti‐dumping purposes. These results have direct relevance in other contingent trade contexts, such as injury determinations and subsidy pass‐through analysis.     

The EU Anti‐dumping Policy Towards Russia and China: Product Quality and the Choice of an Analogue Country

This paper uses the theory of international trade in vertically differentiated products in order to assess whether the EU has calculated disproportionately high dumping margins in its anti‐dumping policy towards the two non‐market economies (NMEs) Russia and China since 1992. Specifically, the investigation concerns cases in which the level of economic development in and the quality of the products from the chosen analogue country are higher than in the two NMEs. The conclusion drawn here is that, even when the EU chooses analogue countries at a higher level of economic development than Russia and China, the differences in product quality and in the levels of economic development between the dumpers and the analogue countries provide no systematic explanation of the size of dumping margins.     

Trade Policy Flexibilities and Turkey: Tariffs,Anti‐dumping,Safeguards and WTO Dispute Settlement

The commitment to lower import tariffs and to maintain tariffs at low levels entails political‐economic trade‐offs. Empirical work examining the relationship between such commitments and the ‘flexibilities’ that policymakers exercise to get around them is still relatively nascent, especially for emerging economies. This paper provides a rich, empirically based assessment of ways that Turkey exercised trade policy flexibilities during the global economic crisis of 2008–11. First, and despite multilateral and customs union commitments that might limit changes to its applied tariffs, Turkey exercised flexibilities during 2008–11 by making changes to both its applied MFN and preferential tariffs that could affect nearly 9 per cent of its manufacturing imports. Second, Turkey's cumulative application of temporary trade barrier (TTB) policies – that is, anti‐dumping, safeguards and countervailing duties – is estimated to impact an additional 4–6 per cent of Turkey's manufacturing imports by 2011. Other surprising results include Turkey's lengthy extensions to the duration of previously imposed anti‐dumping and safeguards beyond expected removal dates, conversion of product coverage from one TTB policy to another, extensive coverage of upstream and downstream segments of important industries and potential deepening of discriminatory preferences already inherent in existing preferential trade agreements.     

Robustness of the KOF index of economic globalisation

The KOF indices of globalisation are the most used globalisation measures in international economics literature, but it uses the nominal trade openness measure to construct the globalisation index. In this paper, we use real trade openness instead of nominal trade openness and recalculate the KOF economic globalisation index over the period 1970–2013. Using the panel data regressions for 146 countries, we revisit the economic globalisation–economic growth nexus to investigate the robustness of the KOF economic globalisation index. We consider several possibilities in model specifications, and the results show that using nominal trade openness measure in calculating the KOF globalisation index is statistically robust. In addition, the KOF economic globalisation index in logarithmic form introduces a more robust outlook in the panel data regressions—a lower bias is emerged by considering different trade openness measures to calculate the globalisation level.     

The Politicisation of EC Anti‐dumping Policy: Member States,Their Votes and the European Commission

This paper examines one political‐economy aspect of the European Communities’ (EC) anti‐dumping policy that has tended to be overlooked in prior studies; namely, the role that member states play in deciding whether to impose definitive duties on imports that have been found to be dumped and that are deemed to have injured a European industry. We find that, in the late 1990s, numerous disagreements between member states occurred over the merits of imposing anti‐dumping duties. These disagreements may well have been partly responsible for the strong decline in the number of European anti‐dumping investigations initiated after 1999.     

Anti‐dumping: What are the Numbers to Discuss at Doha?

While tariff barriers have decreased worldwide through various GATT rounds, anti‐dumping has surged to play a crucial role as the most important non‐tariff barrier. After much debate and opposition, anti‐dumping is on the agenda of the Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations and it is one of the most important issues, especially for developing countries as they are the main targets of this policy instrument. With this prospect, it is important to assess the relevance of anti‐dumping not only by focusing on traditional users but by analysing the experience of new users, which are now major players in the field. This paper improves upon existing studies by providing a comprehensive assessment on the use of anti‐dumping. First, data on the time pattern of worldwide implementations of anti‐dumping laws are presented. This time profile shows interesting relationships with legal developments in GATT and WTO dispositions. Second, usual sources of data are complemented with various other sources. This allows the inclusion of recent heavy users like China, Russia, Taiwan and Ukraine, which are ignored in similar studies but important for their trade volumes. This enlarged and updated dataset shows that new users are even more important than previously thought, with implications for the Doha negotiations.     

中国遭遇反倾销和对外反倾销的指数比较分析

反倾销作为世贸组织允许各国所采取的一种抵制外来不公平竞争的手段之一,目前已经成为世界各国贸易政策和贸易救济的一个重要组成部分。各国由于经济发展水平、法律体系等方面的因素,在反倾销和遭遇反倾销方面存在着较大的差异,在运用反倾销手段保护本国利益方面也有所不同。本文通过大量数据分析,并构建若干指数,对我国反倾销与遭遇反倾销的情况进行国际比较,说明我国在世界反倾销中的地位,深入分析其特点和原因,最后指出了我国强化反倾销的重要战略意义。     

How do countries respond to anti‐dumping filings? Dispute settlement and retaliatory anti‐dumping

Empirical studies have found that countries may respond strategically to the anti‐dumping petition filed against their exporters through their own retaliatory actions. Although most previous studies have focused on retaliatory anti‐dumping filings, in this paper we explore another potential avenue for strategic response—filing a complaint under the World Trade Organization's (WTO ) dispute settlement understanding. Using a panel of global anti‐dumping filings between 1995 and 2011, we analyse under what conditions countries will choose to retaliate through either an anti‐dumping petition or a WTO dispute, and to what degree these two strategies are complementary or act as substitutes. We find statistical evidence that countries are more likely to file a WTO dispute when they have also filed a retaliatory anti‐dumping petition, suggesting that these two strategies may be complementary.     

Summits,Riots and Media Attention: The Political Economy of Information on Trade and Globalisation

Supply of information has increased rapidly through the growth of commercial media and technological innovations. Yet economists still blame anti‐globalists’ demonstrations and public opposition to trade liberalisation on poor information. This paper analyses how the structure of the media industry affects the distribution of information on trade policy and globalisation. We present an empirical analysis of Belgian media reporting on trade policy and globalisation over the 1999–2002 period, supports these hypotheses and finds strong negative bias in media coverage. Moreover, we find that media coverage of trade policy and globalisation is highly concentrated around summit meetings of political leaders. Media attention in the popular press is heavily influenced by riots and demonstrations at summits. The paper points at important implications for public information on trade policy and globalisation and for economists.     

Tariff Liberalisation and Increased Administrative Protection: Is There a Quid Pro Quo?

Theoretical models and intuition suggest that the amount of non‐traditional protection such as anti‐dumping duties will increase as more traditional forms such as tariffs are lowered under multilateral trade agreements. This paper is the first empirical study of the role of tariff liberalisation in the spread of anti‐dumping. Through both correlations and regression approaches we analyse the relationship between tariff concessions made during the Uruguay Round trade negotiations and the filing of anti‐dumping petitions, with particular interest in whether multilateral trade reductions have spurred the recent growth in new users of anti‐dumping policies. We find that, at least for developing economies, tariff reductions agreed to under the Uruguay Round not only increased the likelihood of a country using anti‐dumping protection but also the total number of anti‐dumping petitions filed by countries.     

An Analysis of Factors Influencing the Anti‐dumping Behaviour in India

The use of anti‐dumping measures as a trade protection tool, has increased phenomenally during the last decade. One significant aspect of this new trend is the increasing involvement of developing countries. India is one such country which has emerged as a very frequent user of anti‐dumping measures, surpassing even the traditional users. It had initiated more than 300 anti‐dumping cases by the end of 2002–03. Many of these cases are against developing countries. Most of the cases are concentrated in narrow range product groups, like chemicals and petrochemicals, iron and steel, pharmaceuticals and textiles. This study examines India's experience with anti‐dumping measures. The main objective of the study is to identify the factors which might have influenced the anti‐dumping behaviour in India. Discussion of these factors shows that imports have increased considerably. This is particularly true for a number of developing countries facing dumping charges in India. At the same time, many of the domestic producers of the like products have performed poorly during the last decade. Such trends may instigate the import‐competing industries to seek anti‐dumping protection and may also influence the authority to provide that. However, the results of our statistical exercise show that, although imports and performance of the domestic industry might have influenced the initiation of anti‐dumping cases, these factors did not seem to significantly influence the final decision of the authority. The results rather indicated a tendency on the part of the authority to provide anti‐dumping protection to industries, which are characterised by a large number of firms.     

Regionalism Within Multilateralism: The WTO Trade Policy Review of Canada

The World Trade Organisation published a Trade Policy Review of Canada in 2003. In this paper, we discuss the WTO Review and augment the discussion by presenting original data and reviewing the empirical literature. The WTO concludes that Canada's trade regime is open and transparent but maintains barriers in a few important sectors. We subject this claim to empirical scrutiny, comparing Canada's actual imports to a multilateral benchmark based on the gravity equation. We show that Canada imports about what should be expected given the size of its economy and its location. In a second benchmarking exercise, we show that Canada's anti‐dumping initiations are in proportion to its imports and that Canada's exports are targeted less by other countries’ anti‐dumping investigations than what might be expected based on Canadian export levels. Like many other countries, Canada has pursued trade liberalisation through the World Trade Organisation while simultaneously signing multiple regional trade agreements. Our summary of the recent literature indicates that Canada's regional trade agreements have generated more trade creation than trade diversion. Canada has also spurred imports from the least developed countries by unilaterally eliminating tariffs and quota barriers on 48 of the world's poorest countries in January 2003. We also discuss Canadian progress in opening its agriculture and clothing industries. Overall, we conclude that Canada appears committed to advancing globalisation through multilateral trade liberalisation supplemented by unilateral and bilateral initiatives.     

Globalisation and Industrial Policy: The Case of China

After a quarter of a century of industrial policy, China's objective of nurturing a group of globally competitive state‐owned enterprises appears to have succeeded beyond most expectations. However, China's SOEs are far from catching up with the world's leading firms. Protection through state ownership in a massive, fast‐growing economy has permitted China's SOEs to earn large profits and achieve high market capitalisations, but this is not the same thing as building globally competitive firms. The fact that China's industrial policy has been unsuccessful after a quarter of a century of intense effort demonstrates how difficult it is to construct an industrial policy in the era of capitalist globalisation, which has produced intense global industrial concentration across large parts of the global value chain. Although the detailed content of the next stage of reform of China's large state‐owned enterprises is unclear, China's determination to build a group of globally competitive large companies remains undimmed.     

Anti‐dumping Reform: Time to Go Back to Basics

This paper traces and analyses both the legal and economic history of the US anti‐dumping regime, and sets forth the shortcomings of the current system, both in regards to efficiency and equity. It then presents and explains a series of proposals for reform of the system, ranging from abolition of anti‐dumping laws and regulations and their replacement with competition laws, down to less drastic but specific changes within the existing system to render it less onerous to consumers and exporters. The paper finally details the case for substituting safeguards actions for anti‐dumping actions.     

WTO时代的世界反倾销特点研究

反倾销是世界许多国家和地区普遍采用的用于保护国内市场和厂商的做法,该做法已对世界各国和地区产生了深远的影响,根据WTO对反倾销的统计数据,可以观察到在WTO时代的世界反倾销呈现的若干特点及发展趋势。     

Failure of the WTO Ministerial Conference at Cancun: Reasons and Remedies

This paper first discusses four general developments in the world trading system that have made it increasingly difficult in recent years for nations to reach multilateral agreements aimed at further liberalising international trade, namely: (1) the increased technical complexity and disruptive domestic economic effects of the issues being negotiated; (2) the shift in relative bargaining power among the negotiating participants in favour of the developing countries; (3) the proliferation of bilateral and regional free trade agreements in contrast to multilateral agreements, and (4) the increased emphasis on achieving ‘fairness’ rather than reciprocity in trade liberalisation. Differences in negotiating positions of the participants on the major specific negotiating subjects of the Doha Round, such as new rules covering investment, competition policy, government procurement policy, and trade facilitation, agricultural liberalisation, changes in anti‐dumping and countervailing duty rules, the tariff‐cutting rule to increase access to non‐agricultural markets, and further liberalisation in the services sector, are then considered as well as the likelihood of reaching compromises on these matters. Finally, the possibilities of reaching acceptable balances of concessions and gains are considered for such key participants as the Group of 20 developing countries, the European Union, the United States and other industrial countries.