WTO's Appellate Body Rules Against U.S. "Zeroing" Methodology
The World Trade Organization's Appellate Body recently issued an opinion affirming that the "zeroing" methodology used by the U.S. in calculating antidumping margins violates provisions of the WTO Anti-Dumping Agreement. Significantly, the Appellate Body found that the zeroing methodology is inconsistent with the WTO Anti-Dumping Agreement not only when it is used in original investigations also in administrative reviews.
Zeroing involves setting negative antidumping margins (i.e., sales in which the U.S. price is higher than normal value) to zero, which increases the final dumping margin by preventing the negative margins from offsetting the positive margins in the dumping margin calculation.
The Appellate Body's decision and other documents relating to this case can be found here. For more information on the zeroing methodolgy, see the Cato Institute's Center for Free Trade Policy Studies report entitled "Zeroing In: Antidumping's Flawed Methodology under Fire."
Labels: Antidumping
|posted by Douglas N. Jacobson| Permalink 
