breaking out the indicator for whether a particular trading partner-product combination ( _ih_ ) was _excluded_ from the safeguard into one of the three categories described in Table 3.

While the average import growth differential across all excluded products was 52 percentage points in 2002 (column 3), column (4) now reveals that import growth in steel-affected products from PTA partners Canada, Mexico, Israel and Jordan grew fastest (95 percentage points), followed by developing countries that were excluded (73 percentage points), and then firm-product exclusion petitions (30 percentage points). While each of these three differentials is statistically significant, there are two likely contributing explanations for the relatively smaller estimate for the firm-product exclusions: First, the estimation is on _country-product_ level data, and the USTR granted _firm-product_ level exclusions in a way that would not necessarily have applied to all varieties of product _h_ from all firms (or even the same firm!) in the home country of the firm that filed the exclusion petition; see the discussion in Section 2.3.3. Furthermore, many of the excluded products were granted in June, July and August of 2002 and thus would only have an impact on the last six months of trade data for 2002; see Table 2.

Before considering our robustness checks in columns (5) through (8), consider the rows of estimates in the lower third of Table 5. These estimates identify the trade effects of the applied safeguard and exclusions in 2003: the second (and last) year that the policy application was in place. Columns (2) through (4) begin by indicating that by 2003 there was already no longer a statistically significant differential between the import growth of non-investigated products and products that had been part of the original investigation but that had not faced the safeguard at all.

However, column (3) provides additional evidence of the negative effect in 2003 of the applied safeguard for the products and trading partners that were actually hit with the import restrictions. Even though the applied safeguard tariff rates were reduced in March 2003 from their March 2002 level across all affected products, as is mandated by the statute and was unannounced in the March 2002 Presidential Proclamation, the applied safeguard is associated with a substantial negative impact on import growth. The products _h_ for which a particular trading partner _i_ faced an applied SG had an import growth rate that was 37 percentage points lower (coefficient of -0.46) than products that were “only” investigated. Furthermore, products _h_ for which a particular trading partner was subject to the safeguard had import growth that was roughly 39 percentage points lower than the control group of non-investigated steel products in 2003.

Column (3) also indicates that the average import growth differential across the excluded product categories was 42 percentage points in 2003. Column (4) breaks this out according to the three different exclusion categories; one important result is a new ranking of the impact of exclusions when compared to the estimated results on import growth for 2002. In 2003, differential import growth from excluded 19