EU Trade Defence Actions against China and Their Impacts: The Cases of Textiles and Footwear

This paper seeks to deepen understanding of EU trade defence measures and their impacts by looking at two particular cases of their use against low-cost imports of Chinese textiles and footwear. The paper highlights, on the one hand, the difficulty experienced by the EU Member States in reaching agreement in both of these cases due to the very different national economic interests involved and, on the other, the impacts of these measures on the market. Both the textiles restrictions and the footwear anti-dumping actions were followed by reductions in the growth rates of China's exports to the EU. However, they were also followed by an increase in the exports of other low-cost developing country exporters. The key winners from these actions in trade terms seem to be other developing countries rather than EU domestic industry.