CIT Chief Judge Pogue directed Commerce to better explain or otherwise reconsider its labor rate – as he did last year. Commerce was again faulted for failing to address evidence that supported the agency’s previous use of multiple country labor data in the surrogate valuation to calculate duties on imports from nonmarket economy countries. The CIT rejected Commerce’s claimed basis for continuing to favor the Bangladeshi data over other labor data on the record: Commerce’s attempt to avoid the troubling disparities between the surrogate values for labor by suggesting that the datasets are not comparable is unpersuasive. Commerce provides no justification for its conclusion of incomparability other than the different levels of aggregation – a distinction that, absent further explanation, is not a meaningful difference.
