mber countries must agree to all the obligations of its agreements. The WTO also features binding panel resolutions. Countries must accept the panel rulings; under GATT that was not necessarily true. Still, WTO embodies the same spirit as GATT. It favors trade liberalization and globalization over trade barriers. In particular, one main objective of the WTO is to reduce trade restrictions, and one of the first agreements it reached was a general reduction in tariffs. (Schott, 1). For all of the WTO's promise to tear down of trade barriers, there is some concern that antidumping procedures are a covert way of hanging on to some of these practices. Since the WTO has come into existence, antidumping cases have flourished. Between January 1994 and July 1995 there were 238 new provisional or actual antidumping measures were enforced by 19 WTO members (Schott, 221). Most came from countries such as the United States, Australia, Canada and the countries of the European Union. Under the WTO Antidumping Agreement, dumping is generally defined as selling a product in an export market at a lower price than the product is sold in the exporter's home country. It is also associated with selling the product at less than the marginal cost of production. This action is often called predatory pricing. The dumping company keeps its price so low that it drives its competition out of business so it gains monopoly power after a time. A company is able to do this in the long run because after a time it only has to cover its average variable cost, once it covers its overhead expenses. Antidumping is the practice where governments place tariffs or quotas or duties on imported goods that they believe are being dumping in their in order to prevent their domestic industries from collapsing due to the importer's unfair pricing. Examples of goods that often affected by antidumping measures are steel, computer screens and supercomputers, and agriculture. If in fact a...
