The Politicisation of EC Anti-dumping Policy: Member States, Their Votes, and the European Commission

This paper examines one political-economy aspect of the European Communities' (EC) anti-dumping policy that has tended to be overlooked in prior studies; namely, the role that member states play in deciding whether to impose definitive duties on imports that have been found to be dumped and that are deemed to have injured a European industry. We find that, in the late 1990s, numerous disagreements between member states occurred over the merits of imposing anti-dumping duties. These disagreements may well have been partly responsible for the strong decline in the number of European anti-dumping investigations initiated after 1999.