Special rules for non-market economies

One of the more complicated areas of United States anti-dumping law is the calculation of dumping margins in cases involving non-market economy countries (NMEs). An NME is any foreign country that the Commerce Department has determined does not operate on market principles of cost or pricing structures. The Commerce Department presumes that countries it has classified as NMEs operate under centrally planned governments that control all individual firms’ decisions about pricing, investment, and output, and therefore (according to United States law) an NME producer’s home market sales and costs of production cannot constitute an appropriate fair value of the merchandise. To deal with this problem, the Commerce Department employs a special methodology for calculating anti-dumping margins in cases against non-market economies.

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