Does antidumping cause investment and R&D?: Evidence from Turkey

ABSTRACT

This article employs Turkish firm-level data and analyses the effect of antidumping protection on capital spending and Research and Development (R&D). Using matching techniques and alternative control groups and applying difference-in-difference methodology, we find that antidumping duties imposed by the Turkish government significantly increase fixed investment and R&D expenditures. We also show that antidumping duties are effective in terms of increasing the domestic sales. To our knowledge, our article represents the first attempt to analyse the effect of antidumping policy in Turkey, a very active user of temporary trade barriers, using firm-level data.

KEYWORDS:

• Antidumping
• temporary protection
• capital spending
• investment
• R&D

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• F13
• F14
• C20

Acknowledgements

For helpful discussions, we thank Justin Pierce, Benjamin Liebman, Kemal Turkcan and Mehmet Ulubasoglu. Our study was supported by a generous grant (Project number: 113K736) from TUBITAK (the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ This article was published in the 401. issue of Para (which translates as Money) with the title ‘Antidamping Yatırımları Bunlar’ (These Are Antidumping Investments). The link to this article is http://www.paradergi.com.tr/hab20,401.html.

² The link to the press statement is https://www.petrol-is.org.tr/haber/lastikte-anti-damping-uygulamalari-surdurulmelidir-10151.

³ The share of Bridgestone (Japan), Michelin (France) and Goodyear (USA) is 37% in the world total production of tires.

⁴ Our sample covers the years between 2005 and 2013.

⁵ Including (not limited to) Krugman (1984), Grossman and Helpman (1991), Scherer and Huh (1992), Funk (2003), Bloom, Draca, and Van Reenen 2016) and Fernandes and Paunov (2010).

⁶ Pierce (2011) notes that the 259% antidumping duty imposed by the US on Venezuela for aluminium sulfate in 1989 led to a 98% reduction in Venezuela’s exports of this product to the US.

⁷ Bown, Chad P. (2016) ‘Global Antidumping Database’, The World Bank, June, available at http://econ.worldbank.org/ttbd/gad/.

⁸ We used the nearest neighbourhood method as the matching algorithm.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey [113K736].