Brussels, 25/07/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Sunday 24 July, China announced that it had begun to impose anti-dumping tariff duties ranging from 37% to 46.3% on certain kinds of steel from the EU, South Korea and Japan, which are used in electric transformers and engines.
In a press release published on Sunday on his website, the Chinese minister for trade explained that this measure was to prevent these countries selling their steel at knockdown prices.
China produces more than half the world's steel and is the target of several EU investigations and anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures targeting its exports (EUROPE 11489, 11591).
During a visit of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to China on Friday 22 July, the Chinese Prime Minister, Li Keqiang, provided assurances that his country “would not engage in a trade or a currency war”.
During their annual bilateral summit in the middle of July, the EU and China agreed to set up a joint workgroup on the question of steel, in an effort to resolve the problem of Chinese steel overcapacity (EUROPE 11593).
Commission efforts to settle the difficult question of how to treat China in the EU anti-dumping investigations, for which a number of provisions in the Chinese WTO accession protocol are expiring in December 2016, involve attempts to find a solution that excludes the EU granting the country market economy status (MES). It will be based on a new methodology for calculating anti-dumping and toughening up the EU's trade defence regime (EUROPE 11598). (Original version in French by Emmanuel Hagry)