Working Paper: NBER ID: w1098
Authors: Barry J. Eichengreen; Hans van der Ven
Abstract: This paper examines the controversy surrounding recent allegations that foreign producers are dumping steel products onto U.S. markets. The paper is in four sections, which take four quite distinct views of dumping and recent U.S. antidumping policies, emphasizing the changing definition of dumping and the development of administrative procedures. Section II focuses on the application of these procedures to the international steel trade, taking as a case study the most noteworthy of recent innovations : the Trigger Price Mechanism for steel. Section III considers models that can be used to analyze dumping. The models of most relevance to the practices currently at issue in the steel industry seem to us models of oligopolistic rivalry in imperfectly competitive, segmented markets. We develop a model designed to identify crucial factors upon which the incidence of dumping will depend: the number of firms producing for each national market,their costs, their market shares, and the extent to which they recognizeand exploit their mutual dependence. Finally, in Section IV we calibrate these models to illustrate how the extent of dumping and the effects of the TPM depend on the model's parameters.
Keywords: Antidumping; Steel; Trade Policy; Market Structure
JEL Codes: F13; F14; L52
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| US antidumping policies (F18) | incidence of dumping (F18) |
| trigger price mechanism (TPM) (P22) | frequency and nature of dumping complaints (F18) |
| definition of dumping (F18) | complaints based on pricing below costs (L11) |
| number of firms in the market (L10) | incidence of dumping (F18) |
| market structure (D49) | incidence of dumping (F18) |
| mutual dependence among firms (L14) | dumping behavior (F18) |