Strategic Lobbying and Antidumping

Strategic Lobbying and Antidumping

Anti-dumping is often defended as a pressure valve which reduces more illiberal forms of protectionist pressure. In the domino dumping model of Anderson [1992, 1993] this need not be true as exporters dump to obtain market access in the event of a VER. The contribution of this paper is to show that anti-dumping opens a channel for strategic lobbying through which lobbying commitments can have favorable effects on the decisions of exporting firms, and through which antidumping enforcement can encourage lobbying. Thus a ``depoliticizing`` institution can perversely be responsible for politicizing trade policy all the more.