The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) criticized the World Trade Organization (WTO) in reaction to an appellate ruling on Tuesday, July 16, 2019 that sided with China in a case in which China had challenged more than a dozen anti-subsidy cases brought by the U.S. the WTO ruled that the U.S. failed to adequately explain in several investigations why it needed to use a price from another country to demonstrate how China’s state intervention had distorted the domestic price of the product. In trade cases against Beijing, the U.S. often seeks a comparative price benchmark outside of China to account for the country’s state-run economy.

USTR took issue with the ruling saying it forced the U.S. to use “distorted Chinese prices to measure subsidies, unless the U.S. provides even more analysis than the hundreds of pages in these investigations.”  USTR also noted that this adds to a growing list of concerns that they have with the WTO, “including adding to WTO Member obligations and diminishing their rights, exceeding the mandatory 90-day deadline for reports, permitting individuals to continue to serve on appeals past the end of their terms, engaging in fact-finding on appeal, and treating prior reports as precedent.”