The United States will impose punitive duties on certain passenger vehicle and light truck tires imported from China. The U.S. Commerce Department determined that these Chinese tires had been sold in the U.S. at dumping margins ranging from 14.35% to 87.99%. The Department also said producers and exporters of these Chinese products received countervailable subsidies ranging from 20.73% to 100.77%. In 2014, imports of passenger vehicle and light truck tires from China were worth about USD2.3 billion. The Commerce Department launched the anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese tires in July last year, at the request of United Steelworkers, a U.S. labor union. “None of the tire firms have joined the petition seeking trade relief; the sole petitioner is the United Steelworkers union,” Tyler Moran and Gary Clyde Hufbauer, trade experts at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote in a recent article. The U.S. invoked a China-specific safeguard to impose punitive duties on imports of Chinese passenger vehicle and light truck tires from 2009 to 2012, with the total cost to U.S. consumers estimated at USD1.1 billion, the Shanghai Daily reports.