. 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.