Recently, the Vietnam Trade Remedies Administration received a questionnaire from the USITC International Trade Commission in the case of investigating the act of dumping paper shopping bags by Vietnamese enterprises to the US market.
On May 31, 2023, the United States Department of Commerce (DOC) announced the receipt of an anti-dumping investigation request for paper shopping bags imported from Vietnam, filed by the Coalition for Fair Trade in Shopping Bags USA represents the domestic US shopping bag businesses.
For Vietnam, the application for investigation named 13 Vietnamese enterprises with the alleged dumping margin ranging from 63.67% to 128.81%. The proposed investigation period is from October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
Since the United States considers Vietnam to be a non-market economy country, the DOC will use third-country substitutions to calculate the dumping margin for Vietnam. Plaintiff proposed to use Indonesia as an alternative country because according to them, Indonesia has a similar level of economic development to Vietnam and objectively reflects the import and export status of paper shopping bags.
Besides Vietnam, other countries to which DOC received information requesting to conduct anti-dumping investigation with paper shopping bags (HS codes 4819.30.0040 and 4819.40.40) include Cambodia, China, Colombia, India, Malaysia, Portugal, Taiwan, Turkey.
The USITC International Trade Commission issued a questionnaire on injury to Vietnamese enterprises producing paper shopping bags
Currently, the USITC International Trade Commission is investigating and considering allegations of injury caused by businesses’ dumping of paper shopping bags. To serve the investigation process, USITC has sent an injury questionnaire to Vietnamese enterprises producing paper shopping bags for export to the US market.
Businesses from the remaining eight countries also received the same questionnaire. The response time for the questionnaire with correct and reasonable information is June 14, 2023 (US time). The method of submitting the answer sheet is specifically guided by USITC in the questionnaire.
It is expected that, after receiving information from the parties, USITC will issue a decision on whether or not to initiate an anti-dumping investigation of paper shopping bags from Vietnam and other countries on June 20, 2023.
The ITC questionnaire can be downloaded here.
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