The origins and evolution of antidumping regulation

Antidumping has about it the aura of a special measure to undo a special problem. Within this view, the explosion of antidumping actions in the 1980s was simply a good thing carried too far: the appropriate remedy to the current popularity of antidumping is to return it to its traditional and proper scope. It is hard, however, to find the basis for this view in the history of antidumping regulation. There is little in that history to suggest that anitdumping ever had a scope more particular than protecting home producers from import competition, and there is much to suggest that such protection was its intended scope. The thesis of this paper, then, is that antidumping has been from its beginning, part of the rhetoric and part of the mechanics of ordinary protection. Antidumping is where the protectionist action is today because it has proved to be broad and flexible enough to handle all the action. This paper has three sections. The first looks into the origins of antidumping regulation, the second examines contemporary antidumping regulation -- antidumping under the GATT -- and the third summarizes the import of the first two.