. Antidumping and other traderemedy laws Trade-remedy laws offer another means of regulating trade at the border. The most significant of ...
. Antidumping and other traderemedy laws Trade-remedy laws offer another means of regulating trade at the border. The most significant of these is the antidumping statute, a mechanism by which countries may impose additional duties on imports that may be found to be sold at less than fair value. A related instrument is the countervailing duty (CVD), used to impose penalty tariffs on products that are found to benefit from subsidies. While the number of countries that employ antidumping laws is on the rise, the CVD law is less frequently invoked. Countries are even less inclined to impose restrictions under safeguards, which are intended to deal with imports that are fairly traded but still considered to be injurious. The safeguard laws were often invoked in the concluding decades of the twentieth century, especially by developed countries, but the mechanism has only rarely been used since the conclusion of the Uruguay Round. The reforms agreed to in those negotiations have made it extraordinarily difficult for any country to win any challenges to safeguard measures that are brought to the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Mechanism.
The antidumping law had once been seen primarily as a means by which developed countries restricted imports from developing countries, but that has changed. WTO members reported imposing 3,058 antidumping orders from 1995 through 2014. The European Union and the United States collectively accounted for 643 orders, or 21.0 per cent of the total, but the two largest users of antidumping laws among the developing countries — Argentina and India — had 762 orders of their own (i.e. 24.9 per cent of the total).11 There were altogether 48 developing countries subject to antidumping orders during this period, but that includes 9 countries that were subject to just 2 or 3 orders each, and 14 that faced just one order. China was the target of the greatest number — the 759 antidumping orders against that country constituted 24.8 per cent of the total — while other large, Asian economies attracted many of the others. Nearly half of all orders (1,497) were imposed on China, India, Indonesia, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan Province of China and Thailand.
The data in tables 13 and 14 show the relative frequency with which different developing countries have either been senders or receivers under the antidumping law. The two tables confirm a general relationship between the size of a developing country and its propensity to be on either side of these transactions. China and India, for example, top the lists in both respects. There are only a few exceptions to this general rule, including two countries that imposed no orders but were subject to at least one (i.e. Israel and Zimbabwe), and four countries that imposed orders on others but were not subject to any (i.e. Costa Rica, Jamaica, Morocco and Nicaragua). The data show that 31 developing countries have imposed antidumping orders since 1995 and that another 24 have taken steps towards doing so. That leaves nearly 100 developing countries that neither conduct investigations nor impose orders.
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