Miss Lau cited anti-dumping as an area to illustrate that international trade rules could easily be misused for protectionist purposes.
"Anti-dumping is a contingent protection which aims at providing remedies against unfair trade practices involving injurious price discrimination," she said.
"Under the rules of anti-dumping, importing countries can impose anti- dumping duties on imported products if it can be established that dumping exists, material injury is done to the domestic industry, and a casual link exists between these two."
Miss Lau said "dumping" was determined by a mechanical comparison of the "normal value" of the product with its "export price" but such a simple formula approach failed to distinguish predatory pricing from legitimate price effects of normal competition.
"As regards 'injury', this remains a matter of subjective judgement. Although there are references to economic indicators such as output, market share, revenue, profits, capacity utilisation, there is no defined criteria for determining when injury is "material"," she said.
"Needless to say, the determination of casual link between 'dumping' and 'injury' is always more a matter of subjective judgement than objective analysis."
Miss Lau said the results were that anti-dumping was applied inappropriately and ineffectively in the modern economy.
"The proliferation of anti-dumping cases create enormous disruption to trade. And, ironically from time to time, we are amused by, or saddened at, the absurd results arising from selected cases," she said.
"Theoretically, while it is difficult to see how small firms in open and highly competitive economies like Hong Kong can be a source of dumping, we in Hong Kong experienced a flood of nine cases within a short period of two years in 1988 and 1989.
"Although eight out of nine cases were subsequently terminated, Hong Kong was the loser as trade was stifled in the process."
Page 10Page 11
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.