From the Editor

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the fifth issue of The International Trade Journal (ITJ)’s thirty-seventh volume. The articles in this issue focus on trade protection, agreements, and disputes. They look at anti-dumping measures, the World Trade Organization’s (WTOs) dispute settlement mechanism (DSM), trade negotiations, and trade disputes over bananas and wood-based products.

The first article in this issue, by Lucas Lourenço, Douglas Silveira, Glauco Oliveira, and Cláudio Vasconcelos, looks at how antidumping measures affect markups in Latin America and other emerging economies.¹ Using a difference-in-difference model, they find that firms’ markups increased following the imposition of anti-dumping measures in their industry. Moreover, they found that the increase was larger in Latin America than in other emerging economies.

The second article, by Hyo Won Lee, looks at how countries use the World Trade Organization’s (WTOs) dispute settlement mechanism (DSM).² The article finds that countries use the full multilateral dispute settlement process more often when they already have experience with the process either as a complainant or a respondent. In contrast, prior experience did not affect usage of the full process under the less legalistic procedures of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs. The study also finds that developing countries were more likely to use the full process when they could get legal assistance from the Advisory Centre on WTO law. The author argues that these results support the idea that strengthening developing countries’ legal capacity will encourage them to use the full legal process for dispute settlement.

The third article, by Aras Zirgulis and Tom Hashimoto, looks at the long-running trade dispute between the European Union and the United States (US) over bananas. The article argues that the importance of internal economies of scale and the role of heterogenous firms in the sector means that the new trade theory better explains the banana trade than the neo-classical Heckscher-Ohlin trade model. But the authors also note that political economy considerations were important and that these considerations evolved over time due to globalization of the industry.

The fourth article, by Gabriel Mhonyera, Ernie Steenkamp, Marianne Matthee, and Susara J. Jansen van Rensburg, discusses how the US and the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) should approach the possibility of negotiating a mutually beneficial formal trade agreement. They first propose a general method that countries can use during bilateral trade negotiations to prioritize products. They then apply their proposed method to identify 407 products that SACU should prioritize and 161 products that the US should prioritize. Most products were either consumer or intermediate goods.

The final article, by Ismet Gocer, Serdar Ongan, and Huseyin Karamelikli, looks at trade in wood-based products between the United States and Canada.³ Using state-level data, the authors find only weak support for the J-curve hypothesis in this sector. They also estimate that US-imposed tariffs improved the US’s trade balance in the sector for only three states.

As usual, we would like to thank the people without whom the ITJ would not succeed. These include the authors who contribute their articles, the anonymous referees who give detailed and timely comments, the team at the International Trade Institute at Texas A&M International University (TAMIU) who process submissions quickly and efficiently, our Editorial Board who guide the journal, and our publisher, Taylor and Francis, who ensures the ITJ keeps its high standards.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Several other recent articles in the ITJ have also looked at anti-dumping measures (Bienen, Ciuriak, and Picarello 2014; Choi and Kim 2014; Firme and Vasconcelos 2020). In a related study, Nizovtsev and Skiba (2016) find that domestic firms are more likely to adjust their prices upwards following the imposition of anti-dumping cases when demand is more elastic.

² In a related study, Grey (2019) presents a game theoretical model of countries’ decisions to participate in the WTO’s dispute settlement body.

³ Several recent ITJ articles have also looked at different aspects of trade between the United States and Canada (Bahmani-Oskooee and Bolhassani 2014; Olayele 2019; Ongan and Gocer 2020).