The WTO and Anti-Dumping

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1. Introduction

If a company exports a product at a price lower than the price it normally charges on its own home market, it is said to be “dumping” the product. Is this unfair competition? Opinions differ, but many governments take action against dumping in order to defend their domestic industries. The WTO agreement does not pass judgement. Its focus is on how governments can or cannot react to dumping — it disciplines anti-dumping actions, and it is often called the “Anti-Dumping Agreement”.

Among WTO members, AD is the most popular contingent protective measure among others, namely countervailing duty (CVD) and safeguard (SG). (Chad P. Bown 2011) From 1995 to 2000, the number of AD cases initiated accounts for 89.1% of the total cases sanctioning by all WTO members. The share of CVD remained as small as 7.1%. The SG was the least frequently used measure with a share of only 3.8% over this period. (Aggarwal 2004 p.1043)

Governments tend to support the use of AD as a trade remedy measure, since AD is more attractive as a tool of ''political-support” safety valve. It has the following advantages:

First, the sense of justice made it easy to convince the public that the "unfair trade practice" of foreign competitors are the real cause of its implementation. It may help avoiding the blame of the public domestic firms for a lacking of competitiveness.

Secondly, even though SG and AD are both aiming at providing protection to domestic industry, compare with SG, AD has many advantages. 1. AD is subject to the fewer stringent conditions. That is to say, the thresholds of implementing AD is much lower than that of the SG. SG is implemented under two conditions: first, if there is a surge of imports; second, the domes...

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Presentation of false information or failure to provide documents within the deadline may also be punished by a fine. When the number of suppliers, products or transactions is too large, the Ministry may select a sample for the investigation using statistical sampling methods on the basis of the information available at the time of the selection or by choosing those suppliers or products with the largest import volumes.

When Mexico started to file AD on China, Chinese producers failed to respond the request of SE within the time limit in the first several years. China's passive reaction stimulated such actions of Mexican complainants at the beginning years. Therefore, SE uses the "facts available" provided exclusively by the domestic producers to calculate the highest margin of dumping; that is why some antidumping duties reach to more than 1200%.

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