US to impose punitive duties on China tires
Print Edition
THE United States will impose punitive duties on certain passenger vehicle and light truck tires imported from China, a US trade authority has ruled, despite China’s repeated strong objections.
A US industry is “materially injured” by imports of these Chinese tires that “the US Department of Commerce has determined are subsidized and sold in the United States at less than fair value,” the US International Trade Commission said in a final ruling on Tuesday.
The US Commerce Department said last month it had determined that these Chinese tires had been sold in the US at dumping margins ranging from 14.35 percent to 87.99 percent.
The department also said producers and exporters of these Chinese products received countervailable subsidies ranging from 20.73 percent to 100.77 percent.
As a result of the USITC’s affirmative determinations, the department will issue antidumping and countervailing duty orders on imports of these products from China, the trade panel said.
In 2014, imports of passenger vehicle and light truck tires from China were worth about US$2.3 billion, according to the Commerce Department.
It launched the anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese tires in July last year, at the request of United Steelworkers, a US labor union. It was quite unusual that this case was brought by US workers rather than the companies competing with Chinese firms, experts said.
“None of the tire firms have joined the petition seeking trade relief; the sole petitioner is the United Steelworkers union,” Tyler Moran and Gary Clyde Hufbauer, trade experts at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote in a recent article.
“The case for injury is weaker now than it was in 2009, when market disruption was claimed. Moreover, US producers are stronger today than they were in 2012, when the ‘market disruption’ safeguard measures expired,” they argued, noting that US consumers will suffer if the punitive duties are imposed.
Hufbauer estimated that the total cost to American consumers from higher prices resulting from safeguard tariffs on Chinese tires was around US$1.1 billion in 2011. The US invoked a China-specific safeguard to impose punitive duties on imports of Chinese passenger vehicle and light truck tires from 2009 to 2012.
“As always, the commissioners on the USITC face political pressure to make an affirmative injury finding. In this case, the economic facts argue otherwise,” the experts concluded.
China’s Ministry of Commerce has voiced strong opposition to the US for its unfair and discriminative methods used in the trade remedy investigation, which breached the rules of the World Trade Organization and US domestic laws.
China has repeatedly urged the US to strictly comply with international trade rules.
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