One (Firm) is Not Enough: A Legal-Economic Analysis of \u3ci\u3eEC-Fasteners\u3c/i\u3e

The WTO’s Appellate Body (AB) dealt with a number of issues for the first time in the Report of EC-Fasteners. Importantly, the AB discussed the consistency of the European Union (EU) regulation with the multilateral rules on the conditions for deviating from the obligation to calculate individual dumping margins. Although China formally won the argument, the AB may have opened the door to treat China as a non-market economy (NME) even beyond 2016 when China’s NME-status was thought to expire under the terms of China’s 2001 WTO Accession Protocol. The AB further dealt with numerous other issues ranging from statistical sampling to the treatment of confidential information. In handling its investigation, the EU authorities made a number of questionable decisions regarding the collection of information, and this aspect of the process was central to China’s legal challenges