This paper describes a newly collected, detailed database on national governments' use of the antidumping trade policy instrument. The data collection project was funded by the Development Research Group of the World Bank and Brandeis University. While still preliminary, it goes beyond existing, publicly-used sets of antidumping data in a number of fundamental ways. It is a first attempt to use original source national government documentation to organize information on products, firms, the investigative procedure and outcomes of the historical use (since the 1980s) of the antidumping policy instrument across large importing country users. We also report more and recent data on a number of smaller users of antidumping, as well as some limited information on the use of countervailing measures from national governments that are users of countervailing duty laws.

We propose and test two ways in which retaliation threats may dampen the antidumping (AD) activity we observe. First, the threat of retaliatory AD actions may make a domestic industry less likely to name a foreign import source in an AD petition. Second, the prospect of a GATT/WTO trade dispute may make government agencies less likely to rule positive in their AD decision. Using a nested logit framework, we find evidence that both retaliation threats substantially affect U.S. AD activity from 1980 through 1998.

This is the first paper to empirically examine whether a country's use of an import restricting trade policy distorts a foreign country's exports to third markets. We first develop a theoretical model of worldwide trade in which the imposition of antidumping and safeguard tariffs, or "trade remedies," by one country causes significant distortions in world trade flows. We then empirically test this model by investigating the effect of the United States' use of such import restrictions on Japanese exports of roughly 4800 products into 37 countries between 1992 and 2001. Our estimation yields evidence that US restrictions both deflect and depress Japanese export flows to third countries. Imposition of a US antidumping measure against Japan deflects trade, as the average antidumping duty on Japanese exports leads to a 5-7% increase in Japanese exports of the same product to the average third country market. The imposition of a US antidumping measure against a third country depresses trade, as the average US duty imposed on a third country leads to a 5-19% decrease in Japanese exports of that same product to the average third country's market. We also document the substantial variation in trade deflection and trade depression across different importing countries and exported products.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractThis paper uses highly detailed, quarterly data for five major industrialized economies to estimate the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on import protection policies over 1988:Q1-2010:Q4. First, estimates on a pre-Great Recession sample of data provide evidence of two key relationships. We confirm that appreciations in bilateral real exchange rates lead to substantial increases in antidumping and related forms of import protection: e.g., a 4 percent appreciation results in 60-90 percent more products being subject to import protection. We also provide evidence of a previously overlooked result that policy-imposing countries historically imposed such bilateral import restrictions on trading partners that were going through periods of weak economic growth. Second, we use the model to then provide the first estimates that link macroeconomic fluctuations to a change in policy-imposing behavior during the Great Recession so as to explain the realized protectionist response. During the Great Recession, the US and other policyimposing economies became less responsive to exchange rate appreciations. Furthermore, the US and other economies "switched" from their historical behavior and shifted implementing new import protection away from those trading partners that were contracting and toward those experiencing economic growth. In a final exercise, we document how the model's estimates imply that a 9-20 percent appreciation of China's real exchange rate vis-a-vis the US dollar during the sample period would allow for China's exporters to have received the "average" import protection treatment under antidumping that the US imposed against other countries.JEL No. F13