Bangladesh Tariff Commission

March 8, 2007

Dumping Related Information  and Rules

If a company exports a product at a price lower than the price it normally charges on its own home market, it is said to be “dumping” the product. Anti-Dumping Duty is a  protectionist tariff that a domestic government imposes on foreign imports that it believes are priced below fair market value. On behave of the Ministry of Commence(MoC), the Bangladesh Tariff Commission (BTC) has enacted Dumping related Information  and Rules for Bangladesh.

GATT (Article 6) allows countries to take action against dumping. The Anti-Dumping Agreement clarifies and expands Article 6, and the two operate together. They allow countries to act in a way that would normally break the GATT principles of binding a tariff and not discriminating between trading partners — typically anti-dumping action means charging extra import duty on the particular product from the particular exporting country in order to bring its price closer to the “normal value” or to remove the injury to domestic industry in the importing country.

This document is designed to illustrate what information is needed by the Bangladesh Tariff Commission for opening a formal investigation against allegedly dumped imports that are causing injury to the Bangladesh economy.

Dumping occurs when foreign producers sell their products to an importer in Bangladesh at prices lower than that in their domestic market, or at prices below the cost of production. Foreign producers domestic selling price is referred to as its "normal value“ of the product and may.

Any action taken under the specific provision of the Legislation can become an international trade issue as the action represents an accusation that a trading partner is trading unfairly. To the extent possible, effort must be undertaken to demonstrate that any action undertaken is being completed according to the WTO requirements. In discharging the responsibility vested in him, the Chairman of the Bangladesh Tariff Commission will be assisted by his Commission employees.

A complaint must be thoroughly documented and complainants must provide the best information available to them and, wherever possible, give supporting documentary evidence from commercial or publicly available sources.

All calculations should be explicitly shown as well as the sources of all the data used especially noting the period to which the data refers. ln the body of the complaint it is preferable to state only that which is absolutely necessary and place the rest of the intonation in annexes and tables having indicated them in the text itself. All value figures must be converted to the same currency preferably taka.

An investigation shall not be initiated unless the Chairman has determined, on the basis of an examination of the degree of support for or opposition to the application expressed by the domestic producers of the like product, that the application has been made by or on behalf of the domestic industry.

The application shall be considered to have been made "by or on behalf of the domestic industry" if it is supported by those domestic producers whose collective output constitutes morethan 50 per cent of the total production of the like product produced by that portion of the domestic industry expressing either support for or opposition to the application. However, no investigation shall be initiated when domestic producers expressly supporting the application account for less than 25 per cent of total production of the like product produced by the domestic industry.