The Commerce Department approved wide-ranging final duties on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cold-rolled steel products from Brazil, India, Korea, Russia and the United Kingdom to offset unfairly low pricing and government subsidies.
[Doug Palmer| July 22, 2016 |Politico]
The department late Thursday set anti-dumping duties ranging from 10 percent to 32 percent on Brazil, about 8 percent on India, about 6 percent to 34 percent on South Korea, 1 percent to 13 percent on Russia and about 5 percent to 26 percent on the United Kingdom. It also set additional countervailing duties of around 11 percent on Brazil, 10 percent on India, 4 percent to 58 percent on South Korea and 1 percent to 7 percent on Russia.
Duties below 1 percent for developed countries and 2 percent for developing countries are not collected.
South Korea was the largest of the five suppliers in 2014, shipping $206 million of the cold-rolled steel to the United States that year. The United Kingdom was second, with $132 million in cold-rolled steel exports to the United States in 2014.
The duties on the United Kingdom stand out because they are the first the United States has imposed on that country since 2001, said Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Those earlier duties, on stainless steel bar, were removed in 2007, “so the U.S. has not had any anti-dumping import restrictions imposed against the U.K. in almost 10 years,” Bown said in an email.
“This is obviously symptomatic of the global steel glut – even though these other exporting countries may not have been instigators of the global overcapacity problem, they are now also going to be caught up in it,” Bown said.
The U.S. International Trade Commission still has to give final approval for the duties. That vote is set for early September.
