I’m seeing a lot of news about the US federal government dropping its practice of zeroing in calculating antidumping duties. The WTO news item is uninformative. I don’t have time this week to follow the latest developments, so I’ll just drop links:
FT:
The US has reached deals with the European Union and Japan to drop a contentious practice in its anti-dumping calculations known as “zeroing”, ending a longstanding international trade dispute in order to prevent retaliation against American products. The agreements, signed in Geneva, will close the books on a fight that began in 2003 when the EU first filed a case against the US at the World Trade Organisation.
After the WTO found that the United States had not brought its antidumping methodologies into compliance, the EU and Japan requested authorization to impose hundreds of millions of dollars of trade retaliation. Had these agreements not been reached today, substantial volumes of U.S. exports could have been closed out of markets in the EU and Japan, resulting in job loss for U.S. workers and financial loss for U.S. farms and businesses…
Under the agreements signed today, the United States will complete the process – which began in December 2010 – of ending the zeroing practices found in these disputes to be inconsistent with WTO rules. In return, the EU and Japan will drop their claims for trade retaliation.
Politics-oriented coverage from The Hill includes this detail: “the Obama administration said it will try to negotiate a future deal at the WTO to permit the practice.” Here’s Scott Lincicome on the news.