ABSTRACT
The prospect of replacing antidumping laws with antitrust laws—in other words, treating foreign industries the same as domestic industries—would have appeal in the perfect world of economic textbooks, but it ignores two important realities. First, the real world is a far cry from the textbook models, and many of the economic assumptions supporting the textbook models are simply not shared by other major trading partners, which have their own, sometimes very different, textbooks. Foreign companies able to exploit home-market trade barriers and subsidies simply have more market power than a domestic firm. Domestically, all firms basically compete on a “level playing field,” facing, the same tax laws, and government policies. Internationally, the field is far from level. Second, predatory pricing, discriminatory pricing, and other collusive behaviors should appropriately be subject to a higher degree of scrutiny when they involve efforts by foreign companies or foreign governments to control the US market.
