Complementarity and Inconsistency between Trade Policy and Competition Policy: A Case of Anti -Dumping Rule

The complementarity and inconsistency between policy and competition policy have become very important as globalization have been processed rapidly. Trade and competition policies were complementary and shared similar goals, though an important difference was that competition policy tended to target private action, while policy looked more at the action of states. One of the must critical example which shows conflict between policy and competition policy is the ease of anti-dumping law. The U.S. argues that anti-dumping law is in the domain of policy while Japan and Korea and other developing countries argue that anti-dumping law has been used to protect domestic competitions form foreign competition. If justification for anti-dumping argued by the United States is right, anti-dumping rules (or laws) should be run only for those causes in which exporting countries have artificial advantage caused by government's industrial policies and there exist differences in national economic system. However, current anti-dumping logics of the U.S. do not support these justification. According to arguments by the United States, anti-dumping rules should be allowed to impose duties on the strategic dumping either resulted by market-protection by exporting government, or based on monopolistic structure which was allowed or encouraged by exporting country. However, current anti-dumping rules are applied to any cases where there exist differences between price in the importing country and price in the home market, and injure to domestic industry occurred. Many cases of dumpings actually, instead of driving out (or eliminate) domestic competitors in import country and producing monopoly profits enjoyed by foreign finns in the longrun, rather make consumers in importing country purchase these goods with cheaper price, and allow more competitions in the market increasing economic efficiency. It would be very difficult politically for any country to replace anti-dumping rules with regulation of predatory pricing through competition law. Anti-dumping rule could reduce adjustment cost caused by liberalization and so it makes each country accept free trade system more easily. But globalization means one integrated market. So, regulation on price discrimination should not be applied in the domestic and international market separately. However, in the long run anti-dumping rule should be applied only to regulate the artificial advantage created by government's political concern and to predatory pricing specified in the competition law. To solve the problem of complementarity and inconsistency between policy and competition policy, multilateral agreement on competition law and policy is strongly recommended.