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Antidumping Action in the United States and Around the World: An Analysis of International Data June 1998

APPENDIX A: THE GATT/WTO REPORTS

From the beginning of 1980 through June 1994, the Antidumping Code of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) required its signatories to submit reports of their antidumping activity to the Committee on Antidumping Practices every six months. Beginning with the next reporting period--July-December 1994--the new World Trade Organization (WTO) Antidumping Code picked up and continued that requirement. Unlike the GATT Antidumping Code, however, the WTO Code is incorporated into the WTO agreement itself. All WTO members have therefore been required to file reports since the July-December 1994 reporting period. Each reporting period, the GATT/WTO has distributed copies of all reports to the other signatories.

What the Reports Contain

The reports consist primarily of case data tables and lists of active measures. The case data tables give data on all actions taken during the reporting period relating to current antidumping cases and reviews. (See Figure A-1 for a page from a case data table.) For each case on which action was taken, the tables give the product involved, the country from which it was imported, and any of the following that have occurred to date: the date the case was initiated, the date of imposition and percentage rate of protection for any provisional measures imposed while the case is being investigated and decided, the date and rate of any definitive duty imposed, the date and rate of any price undertaking imposed or agreed to, the date of a determination of no dumping, the date of a determination of no injury, and a general category of "other" for actions that do not fit into any of the aforementioned categories. The tables also give information about the amount of trade involved and the methodology the administrative authority used to determine the dumping margin.
 

FIGURE A-1. A PAGE FROM THE CASE DATA TABLE IN A SEMIANNUAL REPORT SUBMITTED BY THE UNITED STATES TO THE GATT/WTO

NOTE: GATT = General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; WTO = World Trade Organization.

The lists of active measures include all of the antidumping measures (that is, duty orders and price undertakings) resulting from past cases that were active on a given date during the reporting period--usually the last day of the period. (See Figure A-2 for a page from a list of active measures.) Sometimes the lists indicate whether a measure is a duty or an undertaking.
 

FIGURE A-2. A PAGE FROM THE LIST OF ACTIVE MEASURES IN A SEMIANNUAL REPORT SUBMITTED BY THE UNITED STATES TO THE GATT/WTO

NOTE: GATT = General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; WTO = World Trade Organization.

Many of the reports also contain data on terminations of active measures. Those data can be found in several places: in the case data tables, in the lists of active measures, or in separate tables altogether. In many cases, termination of a measure is never reported and must be inferred from the fact that the measure disappeared from the list of active measures from one report to the next.

In principle, the lists of active measures are redundant. If one knows from the case data when measures are put into effect and from other indications in the reports when the measures are terminated, one can derive the list of active measures at any time. In practice, however, the case data, the termination data, and the lists of active measures contain many errors and omissions. Hence, it is valuable to be able to cross-check the lists with the case and termination data. In addition, reported lists of active measures are the only way to know of the existence of measures that went into effect before a country began reporting case data.

Problems with the Reports

The reports initially appear to be a gold mine for analyzing antidumping activity around the world. They are not available in a readily usable computer format, however, and the information for each case is scattered over several tables in several different reports. Furthermore, as mentioned above, the reports of all of the major reporting countries are riddled with errors of one kind or another, including:

• Conflicts between reports for different reporting periods on the dates, duty rates, trade statistics, and so on, for a given case;⁽¹⁾
  
  
• Conflicts between case data tables and lists of active measures relating to the dates that measures were imposed;
  
  
• Cases for which there are no resolutions in the case data;
  
  
• Cases that are completely missing from one or more of the sets of tables (case data tables, the lists of active measures, or the lists of terminations of measures);
  
  
• Missing reports--that is, situations in which a country filed a string of reports over time but failed to file reports for some periods in the middle of that string;
  
  
• Missing tables--especially missing lists of active measures and, even more so, missing lists of terminations of measures. When lists are missing, terminations can be determined only within a six-month, or sometimes larger, interval by comparing consecutive lists of active measures to determine which orders on the list for one period were not on the list for the following period);
  
  
• Reviews of active measures that are mislabeled as new cases, and to a lesser extent, new cases that are mislabeled as reviews; and
  
  
• Cases in which countries fairly consistently reported the wrong information (or reported something conceptually different from what other countries reported). For the definitive duty date and rate, for example, in most cases the United States reported the date and rate of the Department of Commerce's dumping determination, even though the International Trade Commission (ITC) had not yet made its injury determination. Even if the injury determination was eventually positive, the definitive duty would not go into effect until after that determination. In some cases, the actual date on which the duty began was several months after the date reported as the definitive duty date. Even worse, in some cases the subsequent ITC injury determination was negative but was never reported, leaving the reader of the reports to conclude that a duty was imposed when in fact it was not.

These problems were compounded by the fact that in many cases, the name of the product at issue changed from table to table. Furthermore, in situations in which a country brought antidumping cases against several related groups of products (for example, various steel products), the breakdown by product sometimes varied from table to table. One table might list three cases and another list four. Taken together, the product coverage of the three would be the same as the coverage of the four, but none of the three would have exactly the same coverage as any of the four.

Going back to original sources to find the correct numbers or other data whenever an error was discovered would have been a task so vast as to be totally impractical. Instead, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) used its best judgment to correct the data using the information available. For example, if one table gave one date for a given event and two or three other tables gave another date for the same event, CBO normally assumed that the one odd table was in error rather than the two or three, unless there was evidence to the contrary. Similarly, if several consecutive reports gave one date for an event (for example, a date on a list of active orders) and then the next several consecutive reports gave another date for the same event, CBO normally chose the earlier value as correct. The assumption was that for reasons of copying errors, faulty memories, lost records, or the like, the latter number was more likely to be in error. Such methods have their limits, however. In cases that seemed to have no reliable basis for determining even an approximately correct value for a number in question, CBO simply left it blank.

For the U.S. reports, CBO was able to cross-check the final results with a separate case listing obtained from the Internet Web site of the DOC's International Trade Administration. That listing appeared to have errors of its own, necessitating further use of the sorts of methods mentioned in the previous paragraph. It proved invaluable, however, in straightening out the problems resulting from the U.S. practice (discussed above) of reporting the Commerce Department's decision date in place of the definitive duty date and of frequently failing to report subsequent determinations of no injury.

Some Qualifications of the Final Data Set

The final data set (hereafter referred to as the GATT/WTO data set) resulting from CBO's work on the GATT/WTO semiannual reports is very useful for comparing and contrasting the use of antidumping laws by countries around the world and for assessing the prevalence of their use and how it is changing. Several qualifications must be kept in mind, however.

Errors in the Data. CBO believes that the judgments it made in correcting the data were reasonable and that the resulting numbers used in the questionable cases are mostly correct, or are at least close to the correct values. The resulting data set is undoubtedly more accurate than the original GATT/WTO reports before CBO worked out the inconsistencies and other problems. CBO cannot guarantee, however, that all of the errors were found or that all of the errors and inconsistencies that were found were resolved correctly. In fact, the errors in the original data and the resulting judgment calls they required were so numerous that the final data set undoubtedly contains some incorrect numbers.

The remaining errors should not significantly affect the summary statistics given in this paper. For such statistics, the law of large numbers should come into play: numbers that are larger than their correct values average in with numbers that are smaller than their correct values, and the individual errors tend to cancel each other out. Someone interested in looking at the data set for numbers relating to a specific case, however, cannot be completely confident that the numbers are correct. For such use, one should verify the numbers by going back to original sources, which would be the published decisions of the administrative authority of the country bringing the antidumping case.

Incomplete Reporting by Countries That Filed Reports. The problem of isolated missing reports by countries that filed reports in most periods is not particularly serious. In principle, it means that a few cases may be missing from the data set, but it seems unlikely that there are many such cases, for two reasons. First, in most such instances, the country in question reported few if any cases in the periods for which their reports were available, and it seems likely that the country failed to file a report simply because it took no actions during the period (even though countries were supposed to report that no actions had been taken).

Second, most cases take longer than six months to complete, so most cases on which actions were taken during the missing reporting periods had actions taken in other periods as well and thus were included in the reports for those other periods. Even cases that were initiated and completed within the missing periods would be indicated on subsequent lists of active measures if they resulted in measures being taken. Consequently, although information specific to the missing period may have been lost for some cases, few if any cases are likely to have been completely missed, and the few that may have been missed would be cases that resulted in no antidumping measures being taken.

Completeness of World Coverage. The data set covers cases brought by countries that were signatories to the GATT/WTO Antidumping Code at the time of each semiannual report and adhered to the reporting requirement of the code. (See Table A-1 for a list of countries covered for each reporting period.) Starting with the July-December 1994 reporting period, those countries have included almost all countries whose antidumping policies are of economic interest to the United States. That is the first reporting period under the new WTO regime, which requires all WTO members to file reports of their antidumping activity.
 

Despite the new requirement, many countries have not submitted reports. Some of the nonreporting countries are not members of the WTO and therefore are not required to file reports. Most of the nonreporting countries have probably not had significant antidumping activity. Whether they have or not, however, few of them are important U.S. export markets, so their antidumping activity is of little economic interest to the United States. (See Table A-2, which lists the U.S. export markets that have never filed a GATT/WTO report and gives the share of U.S. exports going to those markets.)
 

The largest U.S. export markets not covered by the data set for 1995 are Taiwan, the People's Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, which received 3.3 percent, 2.1 percent, 1.1 percent, and 0.5 percent, respectively, of U.S. exports that year. All other noncovered countries combined received less than 4 percent of U.S. exports. Over 89 percent of U.S. exports went to countries for which the data set has case data for the year, and just over 82 percent went to countries for which the set has lists of active measures or for which such lists can be derived. (See Figure A-3 and Tables A-3 and A-4 for the corresponding shares of U.S. exports covered by GATT/WTO reports for each year going back to 1983.) Hence, statistics drawn from the final years of the data set should give a fairly accurate indication of antidumping activity around the world that is of economic interest to the United States.
 

FIGURE A-3. PERCENTAGE OF U.S. EXPORTS GOING TO COUNTRIES REPORTING CASE DATA AND A LIST OF ACTIVE MEASURES

SOURCE: Congressional Budget Office based on the semiannual reports to the GATT/WTO and trade data from the Bureau of the Census.

NOTES: In the panel relating to case data, the tick marks labeled with years are for July through December of the years in question. The unlabeled tick marks in between are for January through June. In the panel relating to lists of active measures, the tick marks labeled with years are for December 31 of the years in question. The unlabeled tick marks in between are for June 30. Further details and notes are given in Tables A-3 and A-4.

Before the July-December 1991 reporting period, reports filed by the European Community/Union (EC/U) did not include data for cases against countries that were not signatories to the Antidumping Code. Similarly, before September 1, 1989, the EC/U's lists of active measures did not include measures against nonsignatories.

Before the July-December 1994 reporting period, not all members were signatories to the Antidumping Code, so the coverage of the data set is less complete. Countries covered by the set for 1985 received roughly two-thirds of U.S. exports that year. That coverage is substantial enough so that statistics drawn from the set are strongly indicative of worldwide activity, but they may miss some of that activity. The fact that one-third of U.S. exports went to countries not covered by the data set does not necessarily mean that the data set excludes one-third of the antidumping activity of interest to the United States. Rather, it means that the countries in question did not file reports on their activity, which in many cases may have been negligible or nonexistent. (Several of the countries that have filed reports for many years have had no antidumping activity for the entire time they have filed reports.)

The number of countries that were signatories to the GATT/WTO Antidumping Code grew sizably over the periods covered by the data set, and consequently so did the number of countries covered by the set. Hence, one must be careful not to draw erroneous conclusions from trends in the data. For example, the fact that the total number of active measures in the set has increased over time is not proof that antidumping activity around the world is increasing. Even if all countries' activity had remained the same, the fact that more countries have begun reporting over time means that the set would contain an increasing worldwide total of active orders over time.

Finally, before the July-December 1991 reporting period, the European Community/Union (EC/U) did not report case data for cases brought against countries that were not signatories to the Antidumping Code. Furthermore, its first list of active measures to include measures against noncode signatories was that for September 1, 1989--the list included in the same report containing the January-June 1989 case data. Figure A-3 and Tables A-3 and A-4 therefore show two sets of numbers: one including and one excluding the EC/U before those times. That reporting practice does not affect the statistics for EC/U cases against the United States, but it does affect statistics relating to total antidumping activity.

1. Most cases appear in the reports for more than one reporting period because the case initiation, provisional measures, and final disposition of the cases occur in different reporting periods. Also, if an antidumping measure is imposed, the case appears in subsequent periods on lists of active measures.

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