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The purpose of this paper is to quantify how the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) export volume affects the anti-dumping (AD) petitions filed by its major trading partners against the country.

Focusing on the AD petitions at the Harmonized System (HS) Code eight-digit level and the PRC’s exports at the HS two-digit level to its major trade partners during the financial crisis, we construct three instrument variables for export volume within HS two-digit level variation in the variables. These instruments – documents required, time taken and container charges incurred for goods traded across borders – represent trade costs obtained from World Bank’s Doing Business Project. We find rising exports from the PRC lead to rising AD petitions against the country.

Instrumental variable estimates indicate that a 1 percentage point rise in the PRC’s export volume raises the number of AD petitions against the country by about 0.25 percentage points, and the probability of receiving AD petitions by 3.5 per cent. These estimates are about 10 times larger than that found in ordinary least square regressions.

Their quantitative significance underlines why it is important to consider the issue of export endogeneity in the estimation, and that the failure of the current trade statistics to account for the true value-added of traded goods particularly disadvantaged the PRC given its position as the factory of the world.