The World Trade Organization has issued a dispute panel ruling backing South Korea's complaint against the U.S. Commerce Department's use of the zeroing methodology in antidumping proceedings targeting imports of Korean steel products. The United States offered no defense of Commerce's actions.
The ruling, first forwarded to the United States and South Korea on Dec. 21, concludes that Commerce's use of zeroing in calculating dumping margins in three investigations violates the first sentence of Article 2.4.2 of the WTO's Antidumping Agreement.
That provision states that the existence of dumping margins during the investigative phase "shall normally be based on the basis of a comparison of a weighted average normal value with a weighted average of prices of all comparable export transactions or by a comparison of normal value and export prices on a transaction-to-transaction basis."
The WTO has now issued more than 20 rulings on the zeroing issue, with most of the challenges targeting Commerce's use of the methodology. The WTO's Appellate Body has consistently ruled against all forms of the zeroing methodology in all stages of U.S. antidumping proceedings, including original investigations, administrative reviews, new shipper reviews, and sunset reviews.
However, the United States says it cannot initiate across-the-board reviews of existing dumping orders based on zeroing in order to recalculate the duties, instead insisting that affected members challenge individual duty orders through WTO dispute settlement.
The United States also argues it cannot correct investigation results based on the illegal use of zeroing without a WTO case being filed by an aggrieved country. Only after such a case has been filed and ruled on can a redetermination take place to amend the final duty order, according to U.S. officials.
