Anti-dumping in South Africa: From Proliferation to Moderation

18/06/2015 10:28 - 679 Views

Lawrence Edwards - Associate Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

South Africa’s use of temporary trade barriers (TTBs) shows many similarities with other emerging economies: an increase in use of antidumping measures during the 1990s and a shift in the incidence of antidumping policy towards India, China and other emerging economies in recent years. Yet there are important differences that reflect the unique domestic characteristics of South Africa’s antidumping policy. This paper examines South Africa’s use of TTBs over the past two decades and draws the following insights.

While South Africa was a world leader in the use of antidumping measures during the 1990s, in recent years it has dramatically reduced the number of products subject to TTBs. Most recently, South Africa responded to the financial crisis by revoking over a third of all antidumping measures. This, however, was not a pro-active response by the government to the crisis, but rather the consequence of a High Court ruling that various antidumping measures had exceed the five-year period allowed under the WTO. We also find that antidumping measures were not primarily used to offset or reverse the multilateral tariff liberalisation of the 1990s. Antidumping investigations were more likely to be initiated on products that already had high tariffs and faced relative low tariff reductions suggesting common political economy determinants of South Africa’s tariff and antidumping policy. Finally, there is little evidence that the political economy determinants of antidumping policy have changed, despite the inclusion of previously unrepresented interests into the policy space after the demise of Apartheid in 1994.

Source: http://ssrn.com