News Release

August 28, 2003

Media Contact: (202) 789-5200

Exposing Antidumping Laws
New Book Details 20 Specific Proposals for Reforming the WTO's Antidumping Agreement

WASHINGTON -- In mid-September, a crucial World Trade Organization ministerial conference takes place in Cancun, Mexico. The meeting's outcome may determine the fate of the current Doha Round of international trade negotiations, if not the future of the WTO itself. Many contentious issues are on the Doha Round agenda, but if there is any single area in which the United States is perceived as the primary obstacle to progress, it is clearly in the realm of antidumping reforms.

As the world's most frequent user of antidumping rules to repel competition, the United States stands virtually alone in opposition to any significant overhaul of the WTO's Antidumping Agreement. In their new book, Antidumping Exposed: The Devilish Details of Unfair Trade Law, Brink Lindsey and Daniel J. Ikenson explain why antidumping rules enjoy such broad political support in the United States.

Penetrating "the fog of complexity that shields the antidumping law from the scrutiny it deserves," Lindsey and Ikenson offer a detailed, step-by-step guide to how dumping is defined and measured under current rules. They identify the many methodological quirks and biases that allow normal, healthy competition to be stigmatized as "unfair" and punished with often cripplingly high antidumping duties. The inescapable conclusion is that the antidumping law, as it currently stands, has nothing to with maintaining a "level playing field." Instead, antidumping's primary function is to provide an elaborate excuse for old-fashioned protectionism. Antidumping Exposed is an indispensable guide for trade lawyers and firms that deal with the ever-changing international policies of antidumping.