A Centennial of Antidumping Legislation and Implementation -- Introduction and Overview

A century has passed since the Government of Canada adopted the first recorded antidumping law in 1904. The Canadian legislation was soon followed by similar legislation in most of the major trading nations in the industrialized world prior to and after World War I. Antidumping provisions were later incorporated into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) following World War II. Nowadays, virtually all of the industrialized and developing countries in the world economy have adopted antidumping legislation. In view of the long and increasingly widespread use of antidumping measures, we marked the centennial of Canada’s 1904 legislation with a symposium at the University of Michigan on March 12, 2004. The symposium papers document the experiences with antidumping and then ask whether and how antidumping can be reformed. Although we all would probably agree that the best solution would be to retract all antidumping legislation, this is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. Antidumping laws serve a variety of purposes, and powerful political forces stand in the way of eliminating these laws. Antidumping provides a stronger and more focused means of safeguards protection against surges of imports than GATT-legal safeguards laws permit. Antidumping also formalizes a meaning for “unfair trade” that, though essentially meaningless from an economic standpoint, strikes a chord in public perception. And finally, in spite of its appearance of being constrained by objective administrative rules, antidumping in practice is a potent political tool that governments are able to manipulate in order to satisfy powerful constituents. With all this going for it, antidumping is unlikely ever to be relinquished as an economic policy tool by governments.