The anti-dumping duty in the European legislation

Abstract

Throughout the recent decades, economic globalization affected in large scale trade, investments and technology, and contributed to an increase of international competition making businesses more and more committed to sell their merchandise in foreign markets at lower product prices. “Dumping” is the insidious, aggressive and unfair commercial practice used in international trade enabling an enterprise to sell its products to a foreign market at a price lower than the price applied in its domestic market in order to penetrate sharply in the new economy by virtue of competitiveness of its prices. With the growing and continuous internationalization of markets, foreign exporters started to apply dumping to their merchandise when exporting to the European Union with the aim of gaining more market share and maximizing their trade balances. Since the EU trade policy takes inspiration from the economic principle of liberalism, free market and fair competition for its businesses, when dumping meets certain criteria is considered to be an unfair practice that, if pursued in the long run by a significant number of actors, can threaten economic growth of the EU and result in a disintegration of both social cohesion and market equilibrium. To counterbalance the detrimental effects of dumped imports, the EU market economy is committed to neutralize and reduce dumping through a specific trade defense instrument aimed at ensuring respect of the rules on fair competition. This legal mechanism, designed to permit a concrete and prompt defensive action, is the so called “anti-dumping duty” which takes the form of an import duty based on the dumping margin which consists of the difference between the “normal value” of the concerned product and its inferior export price applied in the EU. This thesis will provide the reader with a clear, detailed and deep insight of the EU anti-dumping measure set out by the European Commission and compliant with the rules of the World Trade Organization, for safeguarding the EU industry and avoiding distortions of the normal internal market equilibrium among European enterprises. In particular, the thesis will serve as a guide to help readers gain a wide and general overview of the overall anti-dumping mechanism, starting with the explication of its substantive elements and its procedural issues, to the imposition of the measure, and concluding eventually with a real-life anti-dumping case between the European Union and the Russian Federation to show how this duty is applied in practice.