Commentaries

Despite the positive impact of China’s opening to the global market, there are still some concerns that may be detrimental to its economy. Chinese companies claim that they are able to sell at prices below most of its competitors because of lower labor costs and not having to comply with environmental standards.

In the U.S. trade policy debate, antidumping policy has become a hot-button issue. The U.S. antidumping law, which protects domestic industries against supposedly unfair import competition, has long been unpopular with countries whose exports suffer from its operation. In recent years, many of those countries have been urging the U.S. government to agree to new international rules—either multilaterally at the World Trade Organization or regionally in talks about a free-trade area of the Americas (FTAA)—that would tighten the requirements that must be met before antidumping protection can be granted.

The interaction between antidumping and antitrust is a polemic issue in every integration process for both legal and economic reasons. From a legal perspective, antidumping rules allow practices such as price undertakings and quantitative trade restrictions that are forbidden by competition law, and punish certain types of price differentiation that are justifiable under the antitrust rules.

The U.S. trade remedy laws—in particular, the antidumping and countervailing duty laws and the section 201 “safeguard” provision— are often defended as necessary for ensuring domestic political support for trade liberalization. Consequently, the argument goes, they actually strengthen the U.S. commitment to the World Trade Organization.

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