In advance of the first public meeting to be held by the 16th term of the Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee (“COAC”), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) released a paper reporting that, as of March 2022, the agency was enforcing 652 antidumping and countervailing duty orders – nearly double the amount enforced by CBP in fiscal year (“FY”) 2016. Further, CBP reported that the agency had collected approximately $2.51 billion in antidumping and countervailing duty deposits in FY2021 on imports worth roughly $30.2 billion (“Type 3 imports”).
As shown in the chart below, both of these amounts represent new records.
The total value of imports subject to antidumping and countervailing duties increased by 66 percent ($12 billion) over the total in FY2020, while the amount of antidumping and countervailing duties deposited with CBP increased by roughly 40 percent ($0.71 billion) over the previous fiscal year.
While the overall value of imports subject to antidumping and countervailing duty orders reached a record level last year, the data released by CBP once again confirms that these trade remedies cause only limited disruptions to the U.S market. For the $30.2 billion in goods imported during the last fiscal year that were subject to antidumping and/or countervailing duty orders, just $2.5 billion in antidumping and countervailing duties was deposited with CBP, an amount equal to an average duty on these imports of 8.3 percent. As shown in the chart below, this was the lowest effective antidumping/countervailing duty rate experienced on Type 3 imports over at least the last seven years.
Accordingly, the new data released by CBP confirm that while antidumping and countervailing duties have become increasingly important to a broadening range of U.S. industries, the trade remedy laws have been narrowly-tailored to such an extent that the amount of additional duties deposited at the time of entry is the equivalent of just one-third of the additional 25 percent ad valorem tariff imposed on imports sourced from China pursuant to the President’s Section 301 authority.
