Antidumping and Retaliation Threats

This paper examines how the prospect of foreign retaliation affects the antidumping (AD) process in the United States. We separate the capacity for retaliation into two channels: (i) the capacity for foreign government retaliation under the dispute settlement procedures of the GATT/WTO system, and (ii) the capacity for foreign industry retaliation through reciprocal claims of dumping and the foreign pursuit of AD duties in countries with AD regimes. Using a nested logit framework and analyzing U.S. AD cases between 1980 and 1998, we find significant empirical evidence consistent with the theory that U.S. industry is influenced by the threat of reciprocal foreign ADDs in its decision of which foreign countries to name in the initial AD petition, and that the U.S. AD authority's antidumping decisions are influenced by the threat of foreign retaliation under the GATT/WTO dispute settlement mechanism.