**1 Introduction**

More than 40 members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are now active users of antidumping policy, and developing countries are some of the newest and most frequent of these users. At the same time that many developing countries have started using antidumping to limit imports, many of them have also given up most other forms of flexibility in trade policy by adopting WTO disciplines and agreeing to bind their tariffs. Despite antidumping policy’s escalating use by developing countries, relatively little research has examined which industries _within_ developing countries are using antidumping and _how_ they are using it. This paper exploits a cross-country sample of newly available, relatively disaggregated data as a first attempt to examine empirically the determinants of industrial use of antidumping in developing countries.

As with any economy, a developing country’s adoption of an antidumping law has implications for the endogenous formation of its trade policy. Under the WTO Antidumping Agreement, any member that uses the policy must create an administrative procedure to investigate demands for antidumping protection. Firms in an industry that seek this form of import protection must overcome the organizational challenges of free riding in order to successfully pursue an antidumping legal proceeding. Before a government can impose a definitive antidumping import restriction, the Agreement also requires that its administrating authority solicit and collect substantial economic evidence to confirm that market conditions and behavior of foreign exporters satisfy technical, WTO-mandated legal criteria. Given the presence of an antidumping law and the economic incentives it creates, domestic industries will vary in their need and ability to obtain import protection under this policy. Nevertheless, given that antidumping has become many WTO member governments’ most accessible protectionist instrument, the resulting pattern of antidumping import protection across industries may be an increasingly important indicator of these countries’ overall patterns of import protection.

Which developing countries are the most frequent new users of antidumping (AD)? The columns on the right half of table 1 document the frequency of antidumping investigations and imposed measures across a number of WTO members dating from the institution’s 1995 inception. While the four “historical” developed-country users of antidumping – the US, EU, Canada and Australia – have continued to be active users under the WTO, they are no longer the dominant users as they were during the prior decade (1985-1994) under the GATT regime. A sizable share of the global use of antidumping, at least as measured by the frequency of initiated cases and imposed measures, is now made up of “new user” _developing_ countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, Turkey and Venezuela, the nine developing countries forming the sample of our formal empirical investigation.<sup>1</sup>

> 1 China and South Africa are the two other developing countries that we would also characterize as frequent “new users” of antidumping during this period, but they are not part of our formal empirical investigation because of