The Study On Public Interest In Anti-dumping Law Of European Union And The Experience Brought To China By The Practice Of EU

The purposes of public interest clause in anti-dumping law is to balance the interests of domestic industries and those of industries before taking anti-dumping measures in order to avoid the costs incurred by downstream industries, consumers and the entire society when protecting the domestic industries. Public interest in anti-dumping law asks for the preliminary consideration on domestic and various interests as a whole respectively before the application of anti-dumping duties in order to avoid the situation of protecting the domestic industry at the cost of more harm on public interest which means what the domestic industry benefit is apparently less than what the downstream industries, consumers and the nation suffer due to the anti-dumping duties applied. Therefore, anti-dumping duties bring less benefit to the single industry than the injury to the public interest.The fact that China is shifting from the biggest victim of anti-dumping measures to be one of the largest nation initiating anti-dumping investigations indicates that China has started the practice of making use of the rules allowed by WTO, namely anti-dumping measures to eliminate the injury to domestic industry, especially the newly developing industries caused by dumping imports. Further, considering the products involved in the anti-dumping investigations are mainly raw materials concentrating on the mechanical, steel area, the forwarding effects has become obvious.In addition, the domestic industries are prone to abuse anti-dumping measures to strengthen monopoly of domestic market in the light of their identity as a domestic industry.To conclude, it is absolutely necessary to consider public interest before the imposition of anti-dumping measures to minimize the cost of the entire society.The conflict between the interest of the society as a whole (public interest) and interest of single industries (domestic interest) is not only the issue of public interest concerned but also the issue facing all countries in anti-dumping area. Functioning as the measure of trade remedy, the core task of anti-dumping is to protect the public interest of the region or the nation rather than only confining to the domestic industry. Earlier in 1994, the public interest clause was already innovated in WTO Agreement reached in Uruguay Round to encourage the members to minimize the harm on public interest when imposing the anti-dumping duty. However, taking the view on members concerned, only European Union can be counted as the region where public consideration has been performed comparatively well in terms of boasting a public interest regulation which is higher than those in WTO Agreement. The EU anti-dumping law not only puts public interest as one of the four conditions to impose anti-dumping duty but also provides the detailed procedure rights to ensure the participation of interested parties. In light of EU practice in applying public interest clause and comparing it with the practice in other countries, this article is dedicated to expose that the real public interest clause should make a reasonable determination weather or not to impose the anti-dumping duty only after authorizing the users and the consumers the same right as enjoyed by the domestic industries, and the broad procedure rights to participate based on the cost-benefit analysis and the principle of maximization of the national interest as a whole.Finally, the article points out that the approach to refine our public interest clause is to take the experience of European Union and other developed countries through the studies of their practice. The suggestion of designing China's system regarding public interest in the last part of the article is to clarify the concept of public interest, to add more detailed procedure rights to ensure the parties'participation, to enumerate the non-exclusive factors in the procedure of public interest investigation, to add the clause of"Lesser Duty"and such like.