By Miao Yingchun (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-10-11 14:11

Theoretically, anti-dumping is meant to fight unfair competition. However, if used to obstruct free trade and protect incompetent industries, it would cause serious damage to global trade.

It affects the commercial interests of exporters, especially those in developing countries.

The abuse of anti-dumping measures has made it a non-tariff trade barrier to protect a country's market from imported products and services. Thus, consumers have to pay much more for goods or services than they should in an open market.

Low-priced Chinese exports have helped ease inflation in the US, and has benefited the country's consumers. The use of trade protective tools is a detriment to US consumers and does nothing to help the less vigorous industries.

President George W. Bush decided not to provide import relief for the US pedestal actuator industry in 2003 when the ITC believed the industry was threatened by Chinese exports. He argued "the import relief would have an adverse impact on the United States economy clearly greater than the benefits of such action".

His explanation could be applied to other Chinese exports to the US market. And hopefully, Sino-US trade disputes could be reduced if this was accepted by others concerned.

Bush said: "Imposing the ITC's recommended quota would not likely benefit the domestic producing industry and instead would cause imports to shift from China to other offshore sources. Even if the quota were to benefit the primary domestic producer, the cost of the quota to consumers, both the downstream purchasing industry and users of the downstream products, would substantially outweigh any benefit to producers' income.

"In addition, downstream industries are already under pressure to migrate production offshore to compete with lower-cost imports of finished products. Higher component costs resulting from import relief would add to this pressure.

"Given the significantly larger number of workers in the downstream purchasing industry when compared with the domestic pedestal actuator industry, I find that imposing import restrictions would do more economic harm than good."

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