Patterns in the European Union Anti-Dumping Injury Investigations

Abstract

This paper attempts to detect discretionary practices in anti-dumping (AD) investigations conducted by the European Union (EU) between 1995 and 2012. It complements findings on discretionary practices documented by Blonigen (2006) for the US Department of Commerce. Using a probit model, we demonstrate that the number of decisive factors used for the causation decision has additional discriminatory power after controlling for traditional causation determinants. The number of decisive factors results from discretionary practices; we address this by endogenizing the number of determinants used in the investigations. Based on the Flex model (Santos Silva et al., 2014), which lets us account for the doubly bounded nature of the number of determinants, we observe that the number of decisive factors used in injury investigations is high for cases involving countries for which the import volume is high and for countries that frequently use their own AD law.