# **2.2 The US steel industry's use of antidumping, countervailing duties, and safeguards over 1989-2003**

The US steel industry has frequently sought government intervention to shield it from imports since the 1960s (Rosegrant, 2002), and it has been among the most frequent US users of TTBs since at least the early 1980s. Over the 1989-2003 period of our sample, the US steel industry and its unions filed hundreds of petitions against firms from dozens of exporting countries over thousands of steel products alleging that foreign steel was dumped into the US, subsidized by the foreign government, or otherwise a threat to injure the domestic industry.

Table 1 describes the dozens of investigations that have resulted in the imposition of duties over hundreds of different 10-digit Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) steel product categories during this period. For a comparison of the frequency of these actions, as we describe below, we have a panel of 1471 unique 10-digit HTS steel product codes from chapters 72 and 73 that are represented in the US trade data over the same 1989-2003 period. The first row of this table, for example, suggests that roughly 1 in 6 of these 10-digit steel products were hit with a safeguard during this time period, 1 in 5 were hit with a countervailing duty (CVD), and 1 in 4 products were hit with antidumping.<sup>9</sup> In many instances antidumping and countervailing duties end up being “redundant” policies – in the sense that they are applied against the same product from the same trading partner at the same time.<sup>10</sup> In our formal investigation below we consider antidumping, countervailing duty, and suspension agreement outcomes _jointly_ ; furthermore, we sometimes use shorthand to refer to them solely as “antidumping” in our comparison of the results for safeguards.

In addition to the 2002 steel safeguard (described below) that affected some 272 unique 10-digit HTS categories, in 2000 the US also imposed much smaller tariff-rate quota safeguards on five different 10-digit HTS product categories of steel wire rod and circular welded pipe.<sup>11</sup> 9 After 1998, only 1035 unique 10-digit HTS categories from chapter 72 or 73 are in our sample of trade data, which suggests that the ratio for the three safeguard actions (all implemented since 1998) is even higher if we factor into account administrative changes in the HTS schedule over time.

10 More generally and for the full sample of all US use of antidumping and countervailing duties over 1990-2009, Bown (2011) reports that it is relatively rare for a product to be subject to a CVD and not also be subject to antidumping. Nevertheless the converse is not true as most use of antidumping is not necessarily accompanied by a simultaneous CVD.

11 Note that while the United States excluded Canada and Mexico from application of these particular safeguards in 2000, it excluded no other developing countries. Furthermore, Korea filed a formal WTO trade dispute over the US safeguard on circular welded pipe; and, as part of the settlement, the US granted Korea additional access to the quota in September 2002. We examine the impact of this directly in the estimation results described below.

7