Proposals for Change in the Administration of the Antidumping Act

This article suggests changes that might be made in the administration of the existing Act to improve the efficiency of investigations and the fairness of determinations under the Act in its present form. Most of these suggestions are addressed to the Treasury Department’s fair value investigation, with only a few comments on the International Trade Commission injury investigation phase. The ITC has developed a framework for injury investigations that appears generally to be both workable and acceptable to interested parties. Treasury’s fair value investigation, on the other hand, has tended to be more controversial. This stems in part from the complicated factual issues that necessarily must be dealt with in determining fair value and from the fact that Treasury deals with those issues in a system of divided jurisdiction, with the United States Customs Service and the Office of the General Counsel of the Treasury Department making separate, but sometimes overlapping, determinations.