How Different are Safeguards from Antidumping? Evidence from US Trade Policies toward Steel

Abstract

Use of temporary trade barriers has proliferated across countries, industries, and even policy instruments. This paper constructs a panel of bilateral, product-level United States steel imports that are matched to a unique data set on trade policy exclusions that are associated with the 2002 United States steel safeguard in order to compare the trade impacts that result from application of various temporary trade barrier policies over 1989-2003. The analysis finds that the trade effects of an applied safeguard -- which is statutorily expected to follow the principle of nondiscriminatory treatment -- can nevertheless compare closely with the application of the explicitly discriminatory antidumping policy. The results on trade policy substitutability complement other recent research on these increasingly important forms of import protection.