In a recent CATO paper entitled “Currency Manipulation and the Trans-Pacific Partnership: What Art Laffer, Fred Bergsten, and Other Hawks Get Wrong”, Daniel J. Ikenson writes about applying countervailing duties to currency manipulation:
Even though any benefits conferred by suppressing a currency’s value are available broadly to producers in the “offending” country, which is an attribute that disqualifies the “offense” as a countervailable subsidy under U.S. law and according to the WTO Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, there is support for this approach in Congress.
This is the nth time that this "specificity" argument appears periodically in various articles. The fact is that it is simply wrong. Since currency manipulation is most likely to be considered as a de facto export susidy under Article 3/SCM, then one has to note that Article 2.3 of the SCM Agreement would then take effect. It stipulates that "Any subsidy falling under the provisions of Article 3 shall be deemed to be specific.
This logic appears clearly for example in the Korea Vessels case where the Panel concluded AFTER finding that the measures at issue were export subsidies:
Since export contingent subsidies fall under the provisions of Article 3 (paragraph 1(a)), they are “specific”. Pursuant to Article 2.3, therefore, we conclude that those PSLs that we have found to be export subsidies are “specific”.
