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.     

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.     

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.     

East Asia's Anti‐dumping Problem

East Asia accounts for a large and growing share of worldwide anti‐dumping (AD) activity. East Asian countries have long been the main targets of AD actions, accounting for about one‐third of all AD actions during the 1980s, more than 40 per cent of all AD actions during the 1990s, and almost 50 per cent of all AD actions in recent years. After controlling for factors that might influence filings such as the exchange rate and trade volume, it is found that East Asian countries are subject to about twice as many cases as either North American or Western European countries. Moreover, the trend in filings against East Asian countries is increasing, meaning that in recent years the propensity for countries to direct their AD filings against East Asian countries is growing. One concern is that the growing intensity of AD use against East Asia is driven by China‐PRC. Importantly, but a rising propensity is found even excluding China‐PRC.     

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.     

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.     

Subsidy‐induced Dumping

More than two‐thirds of all anti‐subsidy investigations in the EU are paired with an anti‐dumping investigation against the same non‐EU producers. The outcome may be a two‐component duty where one duty addresses the ‘unfairness’ of the subsidy and the other the dumping behaviour. The philosophy behind this practice is that, at least to some extent, the observed dumping has been induced by the subsidy, and as the GATT Treaty, Article VI commits the claimant not to impose double remedies for the same ‘misbehaviour’, it is necessary to make an assessment of the hypothetical dumping without the subsidy. The EU quantification of the hypothetical dumping margin assumes that an export subsidy translates fully to the dumping margin, while a domestic subsidy leaves the dumping margin unchanged. Using an oligopoly model, we show in this paper that in case of an export subsidy, the EU anti‐dumping duty is lower than the predicted hypothetical dumping margin from the oligopoly model. For a domestic subsidy, the results are ambiguous, and the difference between the size of the duty following the EU procedure and the model predictions is relatively small.     

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.     

Anti‐dumping at 100 Years and Counting: A Canadian Perspective

The world's first anti‐dumping measure was introduced by Canada as a ‘special duty’ that could be levied administratively rather than being enacted. This paper describes the features of this first measure in light of subsequent evolution of anti‐dumping practice and sets it in its historical context – an era that was a high season of globalisation but also an era marked by an awakening of economic nationalism in newly industrialising countries, and by growing angst over the power of large corporations that were emerging to exploit the economies of scale allowed by mass production, as evidenced by the concurrent evolution of anti‐combines legislation. Anti‐dumping's early integration into economic theory as an international counterpart of domestic competition policy has received some official ratification in international treaties, and governments see it as a legitimate policy, albeit one in need of international disciplines. However, analysis of the pattern of its use reveals it to be an instrument of political economy, as a convenient alternative to the WTO safeguard option. The paper explores contextual reasons why today, in another high season of globalisation, marked by concerns over corporate globalism that evoke those of the earlier era, anti‐dumping actions are proliferating where they did not then.     

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.     

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.     

Dumping in a Global World: Why Product Quality Matters

Anti‐dumping actions are now the trade policy of choice of developing and transition economies. To understand why these economies have increasingly applied anti‐dumping laws, we build a simple theoretical model of vertical intra‐industry trade and investigate the strategic incentives of exporting firms to undertake dumping. We show that the definition of dumping matters. Based on a comparison of low‐quality and high‐quality prices, only unilateral dumping by the low‐quality firm obtains. By contrast, the standard WTO definition leads to either reciprocal or unilateral dumping by the high‐quality firm, depending on cross‐country differences in incomes, the height of tariff protection and on exchange rate changes.     

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.     

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。     

更倾销之战——内部瓦解

近年来,中国产品出口频频遭受国外反倾销调查和诉讼,中国已经成为反倾销调查和诉讼最多的国家之一.我国学者纷纷提出应对策略.本文就内部瓦解策略进行了论述,包括争取进口商加盟;聘请反倾销提起国的知名律师;充分发动反倾销国的消费者;在国外建立反倾销预警机制.     

Anti‐dumping duty circumvention through trade rerouting: Evidence from Chinese exporters

We study the evasion of US anti‐dumping duties by some Chinese exporters through trade rerouting via third countries or regions. Using detailed monthly trade data reported by China and the US Customs during the period of 2002–06, we find that US anti‐dumping actions against China lead to a stronger positive correlation between US imports from third countries and Chinese exports to the same third countries. Such a positive correlation is more pronounced for the products subject to anti‐dumping duties (treatment groups) than similar products not subject to these duties (control groups). The evidence is stronger for less‐differentiated products whose certificates of origins are easier to be modified and is stronger for third countries where the rerouting cost is low. These findings are consistent with a trade rerouting story, rather than a simple story of trade diversion (i.e., increase in some third countries' imports from China) and trade deflection (i.e., increase in some third‐country exports to the US). We also rule out other alternative stories, consider prior production in third countries and concurrent anti‐dumping actions against China or third countries, pay a particular attention to the many zero trade flows in the monthly level data and check the robustness to using an alternative control group and quarterly data, etc.     

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.     

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.     

我国频频招致反倾销诉讼原因新论

2001年以来国外对华反倾销数据表明，我国在反倾销问题上的处境在我国加入WTO后日益严峻，尤其是近几年这种状况不仅没有缓解反而愈演愈烈。许多学者都从不同的角度做了解释。但笔者认为这一现象背后的根本原因是国际经济发展的不平衡性，并由此引发了一系列问题。因此要解决反倾销问题，我们应采用内外结合的措施，以内为主，以外为辅。其次，还应处理好经济发展与国外对华反倾销的关系。针对我国的反倾销诉讼在一定程度上也反映出我国在发展中的缺陷。