DUMPING AND ANTI-DUMPING ISSUES: AN INDIAN PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Dumping according to Jacob Viner is a discrimination of price in the national market. Dumping is a situation where the price of the product when sold in the importing country will be less than price of the product in the exporting country. One of the basic rule of WTO law is- the rule of unfair trade. Even though WTO law does not provide for general rules on unfair trade practices, it does have a number of detailed rules that relate to specific form of unfair trade, which is dumping. Dumping is mostly done with an injuring motive of driving away competition from the domestic industry selling the like products in the importing market and thus creating monopoly, so as to discriminate the price and the availability and standard of the product as the exporting country likes. The main concern of the Indian Parliament recently is that, China is dumping products into India, thereby affecting the Indian market and industry, and these Chinese import not only has an impact on the domestic market of India but is also one among the reason for causing unemployment and unfair trade disruption. The parliamentary panel has suggested that the country can ill afford its industry to get annihilated by the flow of imports from China. And India has initiated probe into alleged dumping of certain type of steel from China, Brazil and Germany following a complaint by a domestic player. Dumping as such is not prohibited by law but if such dumping causes any injury or affects the domestic market, then, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariff allows the countries to take action against such dumping which are affecting their domestic market by way of levying anti-dumping duties on such products of the exporting country and anti-dumping investigation in India can be easily initiated and is said to have loopholes which the domestic producers are exploiting.  However, in many situations, anti-dumping duties are itself creating problems. Many of the countries are abusing the anti-dumping law to shelter their domestic market from healthy competition. Anti-dumping law creates a conflict between the protectionist and the free traders. While the protectionist argue that the domestic market is getting affected due to dumping of product, dumping as such is an unfair trade practice. The free traders argue that the anti-dumping measures are restricting free trade of goods and services. India as such has initiated over two hundred fourteen anti-dumping investigations against China.  If we look closer, many anti-dumping measures have created abundant problems to the international trade in the disguise of protectionism and therefore a proper effective reform is needed.