The number of initiations of new anti-dumping investigations worldwide continued its recently noticeable declining trend during the first half of this year. But India keeps its head high on deploying this trade defensive measure with its new initiations of dumping probe during January-June 2006 standing by far the highest at 20.
According to the Geneva-based World Trade Organisation Secretariat, during January-June 2006, 20 members reported initiating a total of 87 new investigations, down from 105 initiations in the corresponding period of 2005. But the number of new final measures increased to 71 during this period, against 55 such measures applied during Jan-June 2005.
Members reporting the most new initiations during the period under review were in descending order: India, with 20 new investigations, up from 14 during the corresponding period of 2005; the European Union 17, Australia nine and Argentina, Indonesia and Turkey at five each.
India's finance and commerce ministers love to point out that tariff rates in India have come down - and that consumers have gained. At the same time, you have these anti-dumping measures that stand in the way of free trade and of customers getting the benefit of lower costs. FE today carries an Economist piece on a paper (by a University of California at Davis political science professor) that makes this contradiction less obscure. Here is the abstract:
A growing body of research shows that democracies have more liberal trade policies than do autocracies. I argue, in contrast, that democracy has contradictory effects on different types of trade policies because electoral competition generates more information about some than about others. It generates considerable information about policies whose effects on consumer welfare are easy to explain to voters, but less information about policies whose effects are more complex. By increasing the transparency of some policies relative to others, democracy induces politicians to reduce transparent trade barriers but also to replace them with less transparent ones. I test this hypothesis by examining the impact of democracy on tariffs, “core” nontariff barriers (NTBs) such as quotas, and “quality” NTBs such as product standards in 75 countries in the 1990s. I find that democracy leads to lower tariffs, higher core NTBs, and even higher quality NTBs. I conclude that democracy promotes “optimal obfuscation” that allows politicians to protect their markets while maintaining a veneer of liberalization.
Here is the Economist on the connection between free trade abd anti-dumping measures:
In other cases, however, governments have promised to fight dumping in order to win support for radical trade reform. Several of Latin America's young democracies, for example, were keen to slash tariffs and peg their exchange rates to fight inflation. They promised to defend companies against super-cheap imports as a way to sugar this free-trade pill. Mexico, for example, launched 83 antidumping investigations in 1993, more than any other country. But this was partly to shore up support for the North American Free-Trade Agreement.
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