Cumulation and antidumping: A challenge to competition

~ S national economies have become increasingly inter-related, national governments have broadened their efforts to coordinate trade-related policies. For years GATT negotiators concentrated on tariff reduction and trade liberalisation. The recently completed Uruguay Round negotiations included a number of agreements in previously uncharted waters (e.g., agreements on government procurement, trade in services, and intellectual property). Competition policy also emerged as an important area of interest during the later stages of Uruguay Round negotiations. Broadly speaking, competition policy is concerned with anti-competitive conduct; in an earlier era when markets were not as tightly integrated, domestic anti-trust policy was sufficient to enforce competition problems. However, in the modern trading environment, domestic laws are often insufficient to protect competition. Hence, the perceived need to incorporate international trade into competition policy. This task is. complicated by the fact that there already are trade statutes -anti-dumping, countervailing duty, safeguard actions -that relate to issues of competition. While it is still an open question whether these laws will be incorporated into some sort of broadly defined competition policy, there can be little question that these trade statutes can have a significant impact on competition in domestic markets. Interestingly, this is not because they serve to promote competition but rather because they often seemed designed to reduce the effect of foreign competition on domestic producers. The tension between the existing trade statutes and competition policy is most probably most clearly evidenced by anti-dumping law, the most widely used trade statute. As currently implemented anti-dumping (AD) law is designed to protect domestic producers while competition law is aimed at