The U.S. can’t double-dip on punitive duties applied to OTR tires imported from China, according to a new ruling by the U.S. Court of International Trade.
The Trade Court ruled on Aug. 4 that two duties the U.S. Commerce Department placed on China-made OTR tires exported to the U.S. – separate “antidumping” and “countervailing” duties – result in double counting those tires because the Commerce Department defines China as a “non-market economy,” according to Bloomberg reports.
It is unclear how the ruling will impact U.S. importers, their Chinese suppliers or the market at large, or how it might impact other dumping cases for other China-made products.
Because of the Commerce Department’s “non-market economy” classification, the U.S. uses prices from other countries – such as India – to determine dumping duty rates, often resulting in antidumping duties on China-made products that are considerably greater than those for products from other countries.
Lawyers for GPX International and Tianjin United Tire & Rubber International told the Trade Court that due to the way antidumping duties are levied against countries deemed not to have a free market that sets prices, those subsidies are already figured into the existing duties.
The Commerce Department is reviewing the court’s ruling and may yet take other action. Some have suggested that Congress could take up the matter with legislation.
The ruling came against a February 2008 Commerce Department ruling that slapped huge – 11% to as much as 210% – antidumping duties on a broad collection of Chinese tiremakers. The ruling, based on a 2007 complaint filed by Titan International, the USW and Bridgestone Americas, resulted in market pressure on a number of U.S. importers, and, eventually, to the bankruptcy and dissolution of GPX International Tire.
Last September, though, the U.S. Court of International Trade ordered the Commerce Department to review its ruling and the countervailing duties it applied to the OTR imports. The court said the Commerce Department’s duty calculations were in error, and in cases were effectively double what they should have been. The court gave the Commerce Department 90 days to clear up the duty discrepancies; there was no word why it took nearly a year for the issue to be addressed.
According to Trade Court Judge Jane Restani’s Aug. 4 decision, the Commerce Department has “clearly demonstrated its inability, at this time, to use improved methodologies to determine whether, and to what degree, double counting occurs.”
