Commerce Successfully Addressed 'Narrow' Threshold in OCTG Remand, DOJ Argues

The Court of International Trade should sustain the Commerce Department’s remand redetermination of an antidumping duty investigation on OCTG from South Korea, DOJ argued. The court only ordered Commerce to reconsider a specific issue on remand, which the department did, DOJ wrote in its Sept. 6 remand comments to the Court of International Trade (Nexteel Co. v. United States, CIT Consol. # 18-00083).

The court remanded only "a narrow methodological issue" for further explanation, DOJ said. The court was only concerned with Commerce's explanation of the use of the 0.8 threshold when the statistical assumptions aren't observed in regard to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's concerns in Stupp Corp. v. U.S. Consistent with the court's remand order, Commerce provided further discussion of the issue in its June 27 redetermination (see 2306280030), where it explained why the 0.8 threshold was not transformed into "a meaningless comparator" when used in its differential pricing analysis, DOJ said.

In its own remand comments, exporter SeAH Steel argued that Commerce misused the Cohen's d test, saying that a calculated value of Cohen’s d required certain statistical assumptions. SeAH argued that Cohen's thresholds were based on analysis of populations that meet specific statistical criteria and that Commerce’s use of the d test in the context of differential pricing analysis was unreasonable (see 2308100022).

The case is one of several others currently working their way through the courts that challenge the use of the d test. Many of those focus on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's ruling in Stupp, where the appellate court questioned the use of the d test.