resulted first in a U.S. safeguard (Section 201) petition requesting relief from surging imports for an injured domestic industry and then a negotiated VER. Table 2 gives examples of U.S. safeguard investigations resulting in such OMAs during the 1970s and 1980s in Japanese export products such as footwear, steel, television receivers, and even autos.

As Table 2 indicates, the safeguard law was not the only import-restricting policy that allowed U.S. industries to seek new trade barriers and that ultimately resulted in bilaterally negotiated VERs limiting Japanese exports to the United States.<sup>22</sup> U.S. antidumping policy, which we discuss in more detail in section 3.2 below, also resulted in a number of Japanese VERs. The most important of these was the semiconductor VER, negotiated after a pair of antidumping petitions filed in 1985.<sup>23</sup> A 1993 petition under the U.S. antidumping law also resulted in a VER over photo paper between the U.S. firm Kodak and the Japanese firm Fuji; this dispute was a precursor to a high-profile WTO dispute between Kodak and Fuji. A 1996 antidumping petition over sodium azide resulted in a negotiated VER with three Japanese chemical-producing firms.

# _3.1.2. China: VERs in textiles and apparel, 2005-2008_

The terms of China’s 2001 accession to the WTO granted WTO members a number of Chinaspecific transitional safeguard mechanisms designed to cope with an anticipated increase in exports from China, and especially textile and apparel exports following the scheduled end of the MFA. For the 2001–2008 period, a U.S. safeguard program covering only U.S. imports of textile and apparel products from China was administered by the Office of Textiles and Apparel (OTEXA) in the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Facing a surge in imports of textile and apparel products from China following the expiration of the MFA at the end of 2004, the United States negotiated a voluntary export 22 During this period, the United States also negotiated VERs with Japan and other exporters outside the legal frameworks of the safeguard and antidumping laws. For example, in 1986 the United States negotiated a VER with Japan and other countries over machine tools under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. Section 232 authorizes the President to implement new import restrictions grounds of national security (Hufbauer and Elliott 1994, 91). Voluntary restraints on flat-rolled steel products had been negotiated in 1985 (Hufbauer and Elliott 1994, 103).

23 In July 1985, Micron filed an antidumping petition over 64K DRAMS that led to the imposition of duties on imports from Japanese firms Hitachi, Mitsubishi, NEC, and Oki Electric. The duty order on 64K DRAMS remained in place until 1993. In October 1985, U.S. firms Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, and National Semiconductor filed a separate petition over EPROMS, and in December 1985 the U.S. government self-initiated a petition over 256K and above DRAMS. The petitions led to negotiated VERs (“Suspension Agreements” in the language of U.S. antidumping) by which Japanese firms Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, and Tokyo Shibaura (Toshiba) agreed to limit exports to the U.S. market. The 256K DRAM suspension agreement was revoked in 1991, but the EPROM agreement was not formally revoked until 1997. Additional detailed data on each of these antidumping cases has been compiled in Bown (2009a).

10