| Antidumping duties are discriminatory tariffs which are levied against foreign firms who engage in dumping. Most economists would argue that antidumping duties should only be levied when dumping threatens to restrict competition. Since this type of predatory dumping is quite rare, it appears that antidumping duties exist primarily to provide relief to domestic industries. The objective of this thesis is to determine how effective antidumping duties are at providing relief and whether alternative trade policies are capable of providing this relief at a lower cost to consumers.; The first chapter of the thesis assesses how much protection is provided by antidumping duties. In this chapter, I also attempt to answer the question of whether or not U.S. antidumping laws contain biases which increase the likelihood of protection. The results indicate that while U.S. antidumping laws are not completely free of a protectionist bias, they are not dominated by this bias either.; The second part of the thesis presents a theoretical model of antidumping duties. The model is used not only to determine the effects of an antidumping duty, but also the effects of a non-discriminatory safeguard. The goal of the theoretical analysis is to determine which of the two policies provides a greater amount of relief to domestic firms for a given cost to domestic consumers. I demonstrate that the antidumping duty is superior to the safeguard under certain circumstances.; In the final section of the thesis, two case studies are conducted. The empirical work has two objectives: first, to determine the amount of relief provided by the antidumping duties as well as the associated welfare costs; second, to compare these costs and benefits with those of a safeguard. The results of the empirical work indicate that antidumping duties are normally an ineffective means of providing protection. Despite this, they may still be superior to a safeguard if the products involved are poor substitutes. |
