Antidumping: Prospects for Discipline from the Doha Negotiations

Joseph Finger and Andrei Zlate

No 632, Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics

Abstract: Maintaining an economically sensible trade policy is often a matter of managing pressures for exceptions – for protection for a particular industry. Good policy becomes a matter of managing interventions so as to strengthen the politics of openness and liberalization---of avoiding rather than of imposing such restrictions in the future. In the 1990s, antidumping measures emerged as the instrument of choice to accomplish this, despite the fact that they satisfy neither of these criteria. Its economics is ordinary protection; it considers the impact on the domestic interests that will benefit while excluding the domestic interests that will bear the costs. Its unfair trade rhetoric undercuts rather than supports a policy of openness. As to what would be better, the key issue in a domestic policy decision should be the impact on the domestic economy. Antidumping reform depends less on the good will of WTO delegates toward the "public interest" than on those business interests that are currently treated by trade law as bastards insisting that they be given the same standing as the law now recognizes for protection seekers.

Keywords: Doha round; antidumping; countervailing measures; safeguards; non-tariff barriers to trade; WTO/GATT (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 K33 N70 O24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2005-11-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int, nep-law and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published, Journal of World Investment and Trade, 6:4, 2005

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boc:bocoec:632

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