One hundred years of anti-dumping in South Africa

Abstract

South Africa is one of the oldest and biggest users of anti-dumping as a form of trade protection, with more than 1,000 investigations conducted over the past 100 years. It has imposed anti-dumping duties both on services (ocean freight) and to address depreciated currencies, long before these became issues in the WTO. Existing procedures do not meet South Africa’s WTO obligations and decisions are often influenced by political pressure to impose duties. Although there is an urgent need for a review tribunal, there have been some considerable improvements in transparency recently.