As mentioned a little while back, in the conference report accompanying the 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act, Public Law: 111-117, the conferees "directed the Secretary of Commerce to work with the Secretaries of the Departments of Homeland Security and the Treasury to conduct an analysis of the relative advantages and disadvantages of prospective and retrospective antidumping and countervailing duty systems." In particular, the conferees "requested that the Department of Commerce (the Department) address the extent to which each type of system would likely achieve the goals of: (1) Remedying injurious dumping or subsidized exports to the United States; (2) minimizing uncollected duties; (3) reducing incentives and opportunities for importers to evade antidumping and countervailing duties; (4) effectively targeting high-risk importers; (5) addressing the impact of retrospective rate increases on U.S. importers and their employees; and (6) creating minimal administrative burden." The report is scheduled to be transmitted to Congress on June 14, 2010.
The Department of Commerce's Import Administration has now posted the public comments received and the transcript of the hearing it held. I've skimmed through this a bit, and from what I could tell all the domestic industry representatives wanted to keep the retrospective system, whereas all the importer/foreign producer representatives wanted to swith to a prospective system. The obvious conclusion to draw from this is that retrospective systems are more effective at burdening imports. On the other hand, perhaps prospective systems could be equally burdensome, but it's just that the domestic interests figure that they should stick with what's working for them, rather than risk a change.
