Macau added to EU’s anti-dumping measures
30/04/2008
The European Commission has decided to add Macau to the countries against which it will apply anti-dumping measures for leather footwear imports. The measures have been in place against China and Vietnam since October 2006 and will apply until October this year.
The European footwear industry complained last year that Chinese manufacturers were using trans-shipment practices to get round the policy, sending leather shoes to be exported to Europe from Macau instead of mainland China.
Macau has a population of 500,000 and, according to the EU, imported 40,000 pairs of shoes from China in 2005. In 2007, the figure was 5.1 million pairs. The European trading block insists that China's use of the Special Administrative Region as a staging post for footwear exports is the only plausible explanation.
The anti-dumping measures are due to end in October, but last year, at the World Footwear Congress in Logroño, Spain, one of the directors of the Trade section of the European Commission, Frtiz-Harald Wenig, hinted that Brussels may push for an extension.
He said: “We must continue on our globalisation journey but we must convince our citizens that it’s win-win, not a one-way street in which some play by the rules and others don’t.”
He insisted that the best way for China to avoid further anti-dumping measures was for it “to stop dumping”.
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