United States Compliance with the 1967 GATT Antidumping Code

The 1967 GATT Antidumping Code (hereinafter the Code) may be viewed as an attempt to state an international consensus about the correct policy and practice of national antidumping laws. It is important to be clear about the nature of that consensus. National antidumping laws are not an expression of accepted economic theory about international trade. Rather, they tend to rest on more pedestrian value judgments about things such as fair competition. These underlying value judgments are not necessarily the same from one country to another, and in some countries antidumping laws are not even considered particularly useful or necessary. In short, antidumping laws have neither a common base of accepted economic theory nor a common foundation in other values. This situation means that efforts to negotiate an international consensus on the subject necessarily involve a good deal of patchwork compromise lacking a consistent underlying policy. Rather than finding common ground, the negotiators must often settle for the middle ground-a bit of one side and a bit of the other. The Code itself is such a document