Global Antidumping Database, Chad P. Bown

The Global Antidumping Database website hosts newly collected, freely available, and detailed data on twenty-five (as of the completion of version 5.0) different national governments’ use of the antidumping (AD) trade policy instrument, as well as all WTO members’ use of safeguard (SG) measures, China-specific transitional safeguard (CSG) measures, and most of the global users of countervailing duties (CVD) through 2008. The information provided in this detailed data base will cover over 95% of the global use of these particular import-restricting trade remedy instruments.

The data collection project was initiated with seed funding by Brandeis University, and significantly expanded via funding from the Development Research Group of the World Bank, and and the Global Trade and Financial Architecture (GTFA) project initiative sponsored by the UK Department for International Development (DFID).

This data collection effort is the first attempt to use original source national government documentation to organize information on products (HS codes), firms, the investigative procedure and outcomes of the historical use (since the 1980s) of the antidumping policy instrument across most of the WTO system’s users. Data on SG investigations includes information on products (HS codes), the investigative procedure and outcomes including details on the structure of measures (including exempted countries) of the policy’s 1995-2008 use by all WTO members. We also report more and recent data on a number of smaller users of AD, and we also provide matching information to data on challenges to AD, SG and CVM via the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU).

History and Evolution

Version 1.0 of the Global Antidumping Database was made public in August 2005 with 16 user countries.

Version 2.0 (March 2006) the Global Antidumping Database added three new countries (China, Indonesia, Taiwan) with extensive data to bring the total to 19 countries. One additional country (Japan) with minimal data was also entered. Data corrections were provided for six other countries (Argentina, European Union, India, Mexico, Turkey, United States).

In Version 2.1 (September 2006), safeguard use data was entered for all WTO member countries for the 1995-2005 period and provided in a new set of spreadsheets. For each of the 19 AD-using countries for which we have detailed data, data on revocation dates and years were added or verified/added. This data was taken from bi-annual reports from the WTO’s Committee on Anti-dumping Practices under Article 16.4 of the Agreement. Detailed data linking challenged to specific AD, SG and CVM measures via formal WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) trade disputes has been added via a new set of spreadsheets. These can then be matched to extensive DSU data found in Henrik Horn and Petros Mavroidis’s WTO Dispute Settlement Database, also funded by the World Bank.

In Version 3.0 (June 2007), we added a handful of new variables to each AD-CTY-Master spreadsheet describing the WTO-reported outcomes to the AD investigations. This is designed for researchers to be able to check against what governments report in their national publications which is captured in other variables in the database – i.e., to verify consistency or to replace missing (unreported) outcomes.

The Future

The Global Antidumping Database is a public good. Errors or omissions should be notified to Chad P. Bown (cbown@brandeis.edu) so that the database can be corrected and improved on a continual basis.