--FILE--Un travailleur chinois examine une pile de barres d'acier d'être expédiés à l'étranger, dans une usine du groupe en acier spécial Dongbei à Dalian, au nord-est de mentons Liao
--FILE--A Chinese worker examines a stack of steel bars to be shipped abroad at a plant of Dongbei Special Steel Group in Dalian, northeast Chins Liaoning province, 8 May 2014. The World Trade Organisation has ruled that tariffs imposed by the US on $7.2bn in steel and solar panel imports from China and India had been improperly applied in a case that could hobble Washingtons use of tariffs as a punitive tool. Mondays (14 July 2014) ruling comes as trade negotiators gear up for a difficult round of negotiations beginning this week over the global trade in green goods, including solar panels. The two cases, which had been deliberated for two years, disputed the way Washington imposed countervailing duties, which can only be applied when the exporters are public bodies, and how it calculated subsidies on a number of Chinese products. The US has been trying for years to build a case against Chinese state-owned companies, saying they benefit from both overt and hidden subsidies that unfairly lower the cost of their production. However, Mondays ruling said the US had failed to establish that Chinese state-owned enterprises were public bodies according to the narrow definition of the term used by the WTO.
