Have Antidumping Measures of EU and NAFTA Members against East Asian Countries Provoked Retaliatory Responses?

The paper examines antidumping initiations and measures since the founding of the World Trade Organization on 1 January 1995. The antidumping initiations and measures undertaken by and against the members of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the European Union (EU) vis-à-vis Japan and 10 other major East Asian economies are compared with total initiations and measures undertaken against all foreign suppliers. The antidumping actions relative to global trade shares (both exports and imports) are used to derive measures of the intensity of use of antidumping. The bilateral trade and antidumping activity data are compared for 11 Asian countries and their partners in NAFTA and the EU. These indicators reveal that NAFTA and EU members use antidumping actions more intensively against East Asia than the trade shares of Asian countries alone would suggest. Separately, additional data on bilateral incidence of antidumping initiations and measures are organized into three discrete time periods: 1990–1994, 1995–1999, and 2000–2004 using the Global Antidumping Database (Version 3.0). One expects the initiations and measures of East Asia against partners in NAFTA and the EU to rise if the East Asian economies have been retaliating. Three case studies of other possible forms of retaliation involving the WTO dispute resolution mechanism and industry-specific antidumping threats involving Asian complainants versus partners in NAFTA are presented. In particular, the paper seeks to demonstrate that, in the parlance of game theory, current antidumping arrangements are a negative sum game. Some reform measures that might be applied to limit the damage are proposed.