Law prof Wentong Zheng wants to replace anti-dumping and countervailing duties with a country-specific safeguard. Here's the abstract of his paper:
This article aims to restart the debate on trade remedies by offering new perspectives on the fundamental defects of the current trade remedy regime and by proposing a bold yet feasible roadmap for reforms. This article focuses on antidumping, the linchpin of trade remedies. While antidumping is being justified as a safety valve for protectionist pressures, I argue in this article that antidumping is a faulty safety valve in that it provides arbitrary levels of protection for petitioners, results in undue uncertainties for respondents, and has too low a threshold for activation. I further demonstrate that antidumping exacerbates democracy deficit in trade policy, as the mechanical formulas used for calculating antidumping duties deprive the trade remedy process of the democratic participation that is essential for seeking consensus and compromises on trade protectionism. I propose to replace antidumping with a new country-specific safeguard that has a heightened injury standard and a mandatory public interest clause. I argue that this country-specific safeguard comports with the policy objectives of trade remedies and is politically feasible. The global safeguard currently in use, by contrast, cannot provide the kind of trade protection demanded by users of antidumping. Finally, I argue that once the country-specific safeguard is adopted, countervailing duties should be subsumed under the country-specific safeguard as well.
Here are two key parts to his proposal:
To make antidumping a better safety valve in terms of being able to identify industries that truly deserve trade protection, I propose a higher injury standard for the new safeguard that will replace antidumping. The injury standard under the proposed safeguard has two components. First, it requires petitioners to suffer at least a significant amount of injury or threat of injury before they can invoke the safeguard. The amount of injury or threat of injury can no longer be just “inconsequential, immaterial, or unimportant” as under current U.S. antidumping law.167 Second, the injury standard under the proposed safeguard requires that imports be at least a substantial cause of the injury or threat of injury to petitioners. Merely showing that imports are a cause of the injury, as permitted under current antidumping laws,168 will no longer be deemed sufficient. Consistent with the basic goal of the new safeguard, these two injury requirements would prevent unnecessary protection of industries that do not suffer significant injuries caused by imports.
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The country-specific safeguard proposed in this Article will have a mandatory public interest clause. Specifically, investigating authorities will be required to provide adequate opportunities for all parties affected by the country-specific safeguard to submit their views and evidence on the proposed safeguard and will be required to take into account such views and evidence in deciding whether the imposition of the safeguard would be in the public interest.
