The Agreement on Implementation of Article VI (Antidumping Agreement or Agreement) provided the substantive and procedural rules for the procedure of antidumping investigations. Substantively, the Agreement protects the ability of U.S. industries to claim meaningful relief from dumped imports into the. market and ensures the fair treatment of exporters in foreign anti-dumping investigations. Unlike from the 1979 Tokyo Round Antidumping Code (the 1979 Code), all countries which joined as the members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) will be following the same antidumping rules.
Application of the WTO dispute settlement procedures in the antidumping cases will largely improve the ability of the nations to contest foreign antidumping actions against nations exporters that are inconsistent with the following Agreement. The Antidumping Agreement also provided a special standard of review procedure to be followed by WTO panels in resolving such anti-dumping disputes. This standard will include panels from second-guessing nations antidumping determinations and from re-enacting the terms of the Antidumping Agreement under the process of legal interpretation.
The Agreement significantly relied on the 1979 Code in numerous way. It incorporated many fundamental aspects of U.S. antidumping practice, including the rights of workers to file petitions, the use of calculated analysis in the injury determinations, and the exclusion of cost sales in determining the fair price of imported products.
Article 3 provides the standards for injury determinations that, with limited exceptions, are altered as from those in the 1979 Code.
Article 3.3 expressly provides that authorizes the prevailing U.S. practice of calculating the impact of imports from various countries simultaneously subject to the investigations. National authorities may combine the imports if: (1) the dumping margin for every country is much more than de minimis; (2) the volume of imports from every country is not negligible; and (3) a combined evaluation is appropriate because of the conditions of competition between the imported products and between the imports and the domestic like product.
As provided in the 1979 Code, Article 3.5 states that the national authorities will examine all the information presented and to be determined of that is there a sufficient causal link between unfairly traded imports and the injury to the domestic industry. The Agreement also requires that the authorities examine the factors other than unfairly traded imports which may because injury to the domestic industry. Provided that Article 3.5 cautions authorities not to attribute injury from any such other factors to the dumped imports.
To the 1979 Code, Article 3.7 requires the determination of threat of material injury to be based on facts, and not merely on the allegation, conjecture, or the remote possibility. The Agreement added a non-exhaustive list of factors to the list that national authorities must evaluate in considering the existence of a threat of material injury. Instead, the combination of the factors considered must point out the conclusion that the further dumped imports are imminent and that the material injury would occur until and unless the action is taken. Article 3.8 provides that the national authorities shall consider and decide the threat of material injury with due care.
