Global Trade Remedy Cases: 2008 Annual Report

Since the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the function of traditional trade barriers, like tariffs and quotas, has been weakened gradually, while trade remedies regulated by WTO agreements like anti-dumping, countervailing, and safeguard measures have been broadly used by WTO members, especially when international trade protectionism is to spread in recent years. According to statistics from WTO, from 1995 to the first half of 2007, the number of initiations of anti-dumping cases globally reached 3097, countervailing cases reached 193, and safeguard measures reached 158.

Generally speaking, the features of global trade remedy measures are as follows: (1) products/industries concerned are centralized relatively; (2) countries/regions involved extended from developed countries to developing countries; and (4) under the megatrends of globalization and economic integration, trade remedy investigations concerning one catalogue of products would certainly affect several countries, thus counteract exports of the whole industry of the relevant country.