Developing Countries Are Increasingly Major Users of Discriminatory Trade Barriers

Developing countries imposed temporary trade barriers -- such as anti-dumping, safeguard, and countervailing duty policies on 40 percent more products during the global economic crisis of 2008-2009 than in 2007, according to a new working paper by Chad Bown. By contrast, the increase in all product lines by major users of such policies was 25 percent. The trend, however, didn’t start from the financial crisis: it was already visible in 1990-2007. Furthermore, the paper, for the first time, identified a trend that a much larger share of China’s exports to other developing countries was subject to foreign-imposed anti-dumping than its exports to developed economies. That was also the case with a number of other major developing economy exporters, deepening concern that these discriminatory trade barriers are increasingly a “South-South” phenomenon.