Trade remedies and World Trade Organization dispute settlement : Why are so few challenged?

Antidumping and related trade remedies are the most popular policy instruments that many of the largest importing countries in the World Trade Organization (WTO) system use to restrict international trade. While such trade remedies are also frequent targets of dispute settlement activity under the WTO, given that Panel and Appellate Body rulings have almost invariably found that some aspect of each reviewed remedy was inconsistent with WTO obligations, an open research question is why aren't more remedies targeted by dispute settlement? The author provides a first empirical investigation of the trade remedy and WTO dispute settlement interaction by focusing on determinants of WTO members'decisions of whether to formally challenge U.S. trade remedies imposed between 1992 and 2003. He provides evidence that it is not only the size of the economic market at stake and the capacity to retaliate under potential DSU (dispute settlement understanding)-authorized sanctions that influence the litigation decision of whether to formally challenge a measure at the WTO. The author also finds that if the negatively affected foreign industry has the capacity to directly retaliate through a reciprocal antidumping investigation and measure of its own, its government is less likely to pursue the case on its behalf at the WTO. This is consistent with the theory that potential complainants may be avoiding WTO litigation in favor of pursuing reciprocal antidumping and hence"vigilante justice."TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Economic Theory&Research,Trade and Services,World Trade Organization,Trade Policy

Taking stock of antidumping, safeguards, and countervailingduties, 1990-2009

This paper examines the evolving, cross-country use of antidumping, safeguard, and countervailing duty policies -- temporary trade barriers (TTBs) -- over the period 1990-2009. The author constructs two new measures of imported products subject to the combined use of these TTBs before applying these measures to new data drawn from the World Bank's Temporary Trade Barriers Database. The research establishes a number of facts regarding trends in historical use to benchmark against policy activity during the global economic crisis of 2008-2009. The 2008-2009 economic shock mostly accentuates patterns and trends already visible in the pre-crisis data: e.g., while the major users of such policies overall combined to increase the product lines subject to TTBs by 25 percent during the crisis, this was driven almost entirely by developing economies which increased their product coverage by 40 percent. On the export side, a previously unidentified feature of the data is that a much larger share of China's exports to other developing economies is subject to foreign-imposed antidumping than its exports to developed economies. The evidence confirms this feature is shared by a number of other major developing economy exporters, deepening concern that these discriminatory trade barriers are increasingly a"South-South"phenomenon.Currencies and Exchange Rates,Free Trade,Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,Water and Industry

The World Trade Organization and antidumping in developing countries

Since the 1995 inception of the World Trade Organization (WTO), developing countries have become some of the most frequent users of the WTO-sanctioned antidumping trade policy instrument. This paper exploits newly available data to examine the pattern of actual industrial use of antidumping in nine of the major"new user"developing countries - Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, Turkey and Venezuela. For these countries we are able to match data from two newly available sources: data on production in 28 different 3-digit ISIC industries from the Trade, Production and Protection Database to data on antidumping investigations, outcomes and imports at the 6-digit Harmonized System (HS) product level from the Global Antidumping Database. Our econometric analysis is to estimate a two-stage model of the industry-level decision to pursue an antidumping investigation and the national government's decision of whether and how much antidumping import protection to provide. First, we find evidence consistent with the theory of endogenous trade policy: larger industries that face substantial import competition are more likely to pursue an antidumping investigation, and larger and more concentrated industries receive greater antidumping protection from imports. Second, we find that industries that use antidumping are more likely to face the changing economic conditions specified by the technical evidentiary criteria of the WTO Antidumping Agreement: industries that face rapidly falling import prices are more likely to pursue an investigation, and industries that are more susceptible to cyclical dumping due to greater capital investment expenditures and that face rapidly increasing competition from imports receive greater antidumping protection.Free Trade,Water and Industry,Economic Theory&Research,Globalization and Financial Integration,Trade Law

U.S. Trade Policy and the Adjustment Process

This paper focuses on the adjustment environment in the United States as set out by the active U.S. trade remedy laws (antidumping, countervailing duties, and safeguards) and the Trade Adjustment Assistance program. We document U.S. industries' use of these various laws and relate industry use of trade policies to import competition and revealed comparative advantage. We also examine potential effects of U.S. trade policies on adjustment to shifting comparative advantage and give examples of industry outcomes. An important conclusion is that trade policies delaying industry adjustment can promote new entry into the domestic industry and thereby increase rather than alleviate the pressure on existing plants and workers. Copyright 2005, International Monetary Fund

U.S.-Japan and U.S.-China trade conflict : export growth, reciprocity, and the international trading system

First Japan and more recently China have pursued export-oriented growth strategies. While other Asian countries have done likewise, Japan and China are of particular interest because their economies are so large and the size of the associated bilateral trade imbalances with the United States so conspicuous. In this paper the authors focus on U.S. efforts to restore the reciprocal GATT/WTO market-access bargain in the face of such large imbalances and the significant spillovers to the international trading system. The paper highlights similarities and differences in the two cases. The authors describe U.S. attempts to reduce the bilateral imbalances through targeted trade policies intended to slow growth of U.S. imports from these countries or increase growth of U.S. exports to them. They then examine how these trade policy responses, as well as U.S. efforts to address what were perceived as underlying causes of the imbalances, influenced the evolution of the international trading system. Finally, the authors compare the macroeconomic conditions associated with the bilateral trade imbalances and their implications for the conclusions of the two episodes.Free Trade,Trade Law,Economic Theory&Research,Trade Policy,Currencies and Exchange Rates

Antidumping and Retaliation Threats

This paper examines how the prospect of foreign retaliation affects the antidumping (AD) process in the United States. We separate the capacity for retaliation into two channels: (i) the capacity for foreign government retaliation under the dispute settlement procedures of the GATT/WTO system, and (ii) the capacity for foreign industry retaliation through reciprocal claims of dumping and the foreign pursuit of AD duties in countries with AD regimes. Using a nested logit framework and analyzing U.S. AD cases between 1980 and 1998, we find significant empirical evidence consistent with the theory that U.S. industry is influenced by the threat of reciprocal foreign ADDs in its decision of which foreign countries to name in the initial AD petition, and that the U.S. AD authority's antidumping decisions are influenced by the threat of foreign retaliation under the GATT/WTO dispute settlement mechanism.

U.S. antidumping: much ado about zeroing

The United States use of"zeroing"in its antidumping procedures has become a political flash point threatening some legitimacy of the WTO's dispute settlement system. This paper provides a positive analysis of the zeroing issue, explains how it has evolved and who is likely to be affected by it. The authors use economic theory to identify how export price volatility accentuates the impact of zeroing on the size of U.S. antidumping tariffs and review the WTO caseload over zeroing. They describe the impact that the U.S.'s retrospective system for assessing antidumping margins has on zeroing and the political economy implications as the U.S. struggles to generate policy reform. The authors survey existing evidence of the impact of the zeroing on dumping margins and contribute their own evidence to suggest that zeroing is just as likely to impact the size of U.S. antidumping duties applied on developing country exportsas developed economy exports. Thus while developed economies have filed the vast majority of WTO disputes against the U.S. over zeroing, the authors conclude that zeroing is also likely a relevant issue for developing country exporters as over 60 percent of the product lines currently subject to U.S. antidumping are exported by developing countries.Markets and Market Access,Economic Theory&Research,Trade Law,Access to Markets,Emerging Markets

China's export growth and the China safeguard : threats to the world trading system ?

Is there evidence from China's pre-WTO accession period that newly imposed U.S. or EU import restrictions deflect Chinese exports to third markets? The authors examine this question by drawing on a newly constructed data set of U.S. and EU product-level import restrictions on Chinese trade imposed between 1992 and 2001 and estimate their impact on Chinese exports to 38 alternative markets. There is no systematic evidence that the import restrictions imposed during this period resulted in Chinese exports surging to such alternate destinations. To the contrary, there is weak evidence of a chilling effect on China's exports to third markets.Free Trade,Economic Theory&Research,Trade Policy,Trade Law,Markets and Market Access

What's Left for the WTO?

Suppose that when addressing the question of “what’s left for the WTO?,” negotiators relied not on the agenda established in 2001 but instead on the terms-of-trade theory of trade agreements to identify tariff negotiating priorities. This paper uses the lens of the terms-of-trade theory to investigate three specific areas in which it is frequently alleged that currently applied tariffs are “too high,” the implication being that there are still tariff reductions out there for an agreement like the WTO to facilitate. These three areas include applied tariffs for countries that are not members of the WTO, applied tariffs for WTO members that are unbound, and applied tariffs for WTO members set in the presence of large amounts of tariff binding overhang. As it turns out, these three areas are almost exclusively found to be the trade policies that developing countries themselves impose. I build upon recent developments in the empirical literature to present tentative evidence - some direct, some indirect - that sheds light on each of these three areas. I then draw insights from these results to highlight open and additional policy questions for additional research

Export Controls: America’s Other National Security Threat

The Trump administtation’s allegations that some imports are a threat to America’s national security have received wide publicity during 2017–20. But the administration was undertaking a more quiet U.S. policy shift on the export side in the same time frame. Addressing the national security threat presented by exports posed different economic and institutional challenges from those associated with import policy, including the acknowledgment that export controls for legitimate national security reasons can be the first-best policy to address the problem at its source. Yet, export controls could also be misused as a beggar-thy-neighbor policy to redistribute economic well-being across countries, even from one ally to another. This paper describes how U.S. export control policy evolved over 2017–20, as well as the international institutions—first the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, then the Wassenaar Arrangement—historically tasked with multilateralizing U.S. export restrictions used to protect national security. With the potential for U.S. export control policy to brush up more frequently against World Trade Organization (WTO) rules designed to limit the use of export restrictions, the paper also highlights new challenges for the WTO’s system of resolving trade disputes. Overall, a U.S. failure to strike the right balance for its export control policy would result in it being ineffective at addressing national security risks, costly for the economy, and problematic for trade and diplomatic relations