G20 Anti-Dumping Levy Use Declining, WTO Says

The use of anti-dumping duties by the G-20 nations is on the decline, according to the latest World Trade Organization (WTO) report on trade developments issued on November 6, 2014.

The report showed that G-20 members initiated 88 anti-dumping investigations between May 15 and September 30, 2014, compared with 103 investigations in the same period of last year. However, the number is higher than the 66 investigations initiated in the same period of 2012. Anti-dumping duties are levied to prevent sales of imported goods to the domestic market at below market rates, known as dumping.

The fall in the number of initiations is said to be due to a recent, significant decline in initiations by India, where the number of new investigations fell by about a quarter. There was a decline in the use of such measures also by Australia, Indonesia, and the United States. These declines more than offset increased initiations by Brazil and the European Union.

On the other hand, the report revealed that the use of countervailing duties – used to counter "unfair" subsidies – by the G-20 nations has increased rapidly over the past eighteen months, and recently in particular. G-20 members initiated three countervailing duty investigations in the period from May 2013 to November 2013, seven from November 2013 to May 2014, and this more than tripled from May 2014 to November 2014 to 23.

Only six G-20 members, namely Canada, China, the European Union, India, Mexico, and the United States, have conducted countervailing duty investigations during the past eighteen months. The significantly larger number of investigations in the last six months was attributed to an increase in initiations by Canada and the United States.

Overall, the trade-liberalizing measures adopted by G-20 countries during the past six months outnumbered the trade restrictive measures that they employed. Import-liberalizing measures accounted for 2.6 percent of the value of G-20 merchandise imports and two percent of the value of world merchandise imports. This amounts to some USD370bn – almost three times the trade value of the new trade-restrictive measures.

However, G-20 trade restrictive measures are up 12 percent compared with the end of November 2013. Of the 1,244 restrictions recorded by the WTO since the onset of the crisis in 2008, only 282 have been removed. Thus, the total number of those restrictive measures still in place now stands at 962.

Source: Tax News