Strategic Lobbying and Antidumping

Anti-dumping is often defended as a pressure valve which reduces more illiberal forms of protectionist pressure. In the domino dumping model of Anderson (1992, 1993) this need not be true as exporters dump to obtain market access in the event of a VER. The contribution of this paper is to show that anti-dumping opens a channel for strategic lobbying through which lobbying commitments can have favorable effects on the decisions of exporting firms, and through which antidumping enforcement can encourage lobbying. Thus a "de-politicizing" institution can perversely be responsible for politicizing trade policy all the more.