What's the payoff from anti-dumping measures?

Doug Campbell examines anti-dumping for the Richmond Fed's Region Focus: Trade Wars (Spring, 2006).  Campbell's paper is a nice overview, and uses  an anti-dumping petition on wooden bedroom furniture for a case study.  This industry has been hammered by foreign competition, but dumping doesn't appear to have been central to its problems.

Anti-dumping measures have been costly:

In the only analysis of its kind, Bruce Blonigen, a University of Oregon economist and leading trade policy analyst, put the 1993 welfare loss of U.S. antidumping policy at between $2 billion and $4 billion, (which in today’s currency would top out at close to $5 billion). While usually a boon for select domestic industries, antidumping duties impose costs on consumers by making them pay higher prices. Even bigger in terms of economic magnitude are the effects on downstream industry participants. 

The steel industry, for example, has historically been the biggest petitioner for antidumping duties, with almost half such tariffs imposed on steel imports. But downstream from the approximately 160,000 steelworkers who benefit from such duties are millions more who work in metal products and auto parts firms.  In a recent article for the American Enterprise Institute, economists Gregory Mankiw and Phillip Swagel noted that for every steel industry job saved by tariffs, three downstream steel industry jobs are lost.

The page with the link to Campbell's article also has links to additional antidumping materials, including an introductory paper by Brink Lindsey and Dan Ikenson, and a history of antidumping actions by Doug Irwin. 

Best of all, is a link to the U.S. Antidumping and Countervailing Duty Database Webpage of Bruce Blonigen of the University of Oregon.  Blonigen's page has links to many papers, data sets, and anti-dumping researchers' home pages.

Comments

[Peter Gallagher]

Thanks for this pointer, Ben. Campbells' article is a nice piece of well-informed journalism on anti-dumping. It's hard to find stuff like this that is up-to-date and accessible. I only wish that Campbell had pointed out that _every firm_ 'dumps'. It's not something that foreigners do; it's not necessarily anti-competitive. I'm willing to bet that all of the North Carolinian firms he mentions have sold product at prices that barely covered fixed costs (i.e. below 'normal value').