Amendments to the Anti–dumping Agreement: The Chairman’s Dinner

Abstract

In 2001 WTO Members agreed that the Anti–Dumping Agreement be included for renegotiation in the Doha Development Round. Various countries made proposals in this regard. In November 2007 the Chairman of the Committee on Anti–Dumping Practices published a draft text indicating the proposed amendments to this Agreement. This article considers the more important proposed amendments to the current text. Scrutiny of the Chairman’s text reveals that it contains several positive proposals, including the exclusion of zeroing in antidumping investigations employing the weighted average–to–weighted average methodology and limiting the overall duration of anti–dumping duties, while it also provides for greater transparency in investigations. All of this is supported. However, it also shows that the Chairman’s text provides for more protectionist use of the anti–dumping instrument than is currently the case, including expressly permitting the use of zeroing in the transaction–to–transaction methodology and in reviews. The analysis further shows that more could have been done to prevent the abuse of anti–dumping as a protectionist measure against trade that is not necessarily unfair. The article concludes by finding that the AD Agreement can be significantly strengthened through the exclusion of certain proposed amendments, the amendment of some proposals and the inclusion of proposals made by Members, but not included in the Chairman’s text.