Just one year ago, the steel import crisis was the talk of Washington.

The House of Representatives had voted overwhelmingly to impose quotas on steel imports, and the Senate was preparing to vote on the same legislation. There was a definite atmosphere of urgency throughout Washington in responding to the crisis.

Now steel imports are down and U.S. steel companies are showing some signs of recovery. The atmosphere of urgency seems to have passed. Unfortunately, the underlying economic problems that triggered the steel crisis are still very much in evidence.

Perhaps the most dramatic evidence that the steel crisis has passed in the minds of Washington policy-makers is found in the recent actions of the administration and the International Trade Commission.

After urging steel wire rod producers to seek relief under a U.S. trade statute known as Section 201, the Clinton administration took five months longer than the law allowed to reach a decision on the case -- and then granted only limited relief.

For its part, the ITC also seems to have had an inexplicable change of heart. It voted unanimously to support anti-dumping cases on hot rolled steel when the quota legislation was pending. This year, a similar set of cases was being considered on cold-rolled steel; the ITC voted 5-1 to block anti- dumping actions.

In making its latest decision, the trade commission gave surprising weight to issues such as the 1998 General Motors strike as a cause for the steel industry's problems. The same issue was largely dismissed in their decisions on earlier cases.

The ITC also seemed to largely ignore a law passed by Congress to remedy past mistakes by the commission. The law directed the ITC to exclude internal transfers of cold rolled steel for further processing in examining the cold- rolled steel market. This seemingly small difference in practice appears to have had a critical impact upon the decision.

It is difficult to avoid the distinct impression that both the Clinton administration and the ITC are using recent decisions to balance support for the U.S. steel industry in 1998 and much of 1999. In administration officials' minds, at least, the steel crisis seems to be over.

In fact, although steel imports have trended down, the underlying problems that sparked the steel crisis are still very much in evidence.

In 1999, steel imports were down to about $15 billion from the peak of $19 billion in 1998. The 1999 import levels, however, were comparable to those at the beginning of the crisis in 1996 and 1997 and were considerably higher than any pre-crisis year.

For comparison, total steel imports in 1999 were up about 50 percent from 1993. The dollar figures also understate the actual impact of imports on the domestic industry since the volume of low-priced imports was still higher than the dollar figures would suggest. Little seems to have changed in 2000.

The sharp rise is all the more surprising since there is almost universal agreement that the U.S. steel industry is quite competitive and efficient by global standards. Certainly, the U.S. steel industry today is much more competitive than it was in the mid-1980s.

The real cause of the steel crisis was not lagging U.S. competitiveness, but economic crises in Asia and Russia and gross government interventions in the market in many other countries. The collapse of markets in Asia and Russia displaced much of the steel production in those countries into the United States.

Asia is showing signs of recovery, but the recovery is likely to continue for some time. And during that period Asian countries will be looking to exports, including steel exports, to finance the recovery. For its part, Japan is still showing signs of slipping back into recession, and the prospects for real economic recovery in Russia seem distant.

The long-term distortions in the industry are at least as serious as the short-term economic prospects. Collusion among Japanese steel companies still supports dumping in foreign markets.

Steel industries in countries from Europe to Latin America were built with heavy government subsidies that threaten to depress world prices for many years to come. Two of the new steel powers -- Russia and China -- sport large and increasingly export-oriented steel industries that were built and remain largely controlled by their governments.

In short, there simply is no global free market in steel. Even if the symptoms of the steel crisis have abated somewhat, the underlying problems remain and will continue to have an impact on the U.S. steel industry for years to come.

Those in Washington who wish to forget the steel crisis are sowing the seeds of still worse problems in the future.