While the original justification of the antidumping laws in the industrial economies was to protect domestic consumers against predation by foreign suppliers, by the early 1990s the laws and their use had evolved so much that the opposite concern arose. Rather than attacking anti-competitive...

Trade policy commitments to lower import tariffs and to maintain tariffs at low levels entail short and long-run political-economic costs and benefits. Empirical work examining the relationship between such commitments and the exercise of trade policy flexibilities is still relatively nascent,...

Use of temporary trade barriers has proliferated across countries, industries, and even policy instruments. This paper constructs a panel of bilateral, product-level United States steel imports that are matched to a unique data set on trade policy exclusions that are associated with the 2002...

Two of the most important trade policy developments to take place since the 1980s are the expansion of preferential trade agreements and temporary trade barriers, such as antidumping, safeguards, and countervailing duties. Despite the empirical importance of preferential trade agreements and...

How high were import tariffs when GATT participants began negotiations to reduce them in 1947? Establishing this starting point is key to determining how successful the GATT has been in bringing down trade barriers. If the average tariff level was about 40 percent, as commonly reported, the...

This paper surveys empirically the broad features of trade policy in goods for 31 major economies that collectively represented 83 percent of the world's population and 91 percent of the world's GDP in 2013. It addresses the following five questions: Do some countries have more liberal trading...

This paper examines newly available data from the World Bank-sponsored Global Antidumping Database tracking the worldwide use of trade remedies such as antidumping, countervailing duties, global safeguards and China-specific safeguards during the current economic crisis. The data indicate a...

First Japan and more recently China have pursued export-oriented growth strategies. While other Asian countries have done likewise, Japan and China are of particular interest because their economies are so large and the size of the associated bilateral trade imbalances with the United States so...

Is there evidence from China's pre-WTO accession period that newly imposed U.S. or EU import restrictions deflect Chinese exports to third markets? The authors examine this question by drawing on a newly constructed data set of U.S. and EU product-level import restrictions on Chinese trade...