Sunoong Hwang
Published: 2022
Total Pages: 0
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Trade has played a crucial role in the rapid growth of Korea over the last few decades. The share of Korea's real exports in its real GDP increased from 4.2% to 49.3% between 1970 and 2010. Therefore, it is very important for Korea to gather empirical information about the determinants of its exports, which is the goal of this article. There has been a substantial amount of research on the effects of global business cycles, the relative prices of exported goods, and the exchange rate of the Korean won on Korea's exports.1) This article complements the existing literature by determining the role of China in influencing the exports of Korean industries. Among the structural changes in the international trade environment that the Korean economy has faced in recent years, the most important are China's rapid growth and its integration into the global economy. On the one hand, China's share of Korean exports has risen rapidly since 1990s, and now the Chinese market accounts for the largest share of Korean exports among its trading partners. On the other hand, the rise of China as the world's major supplier of cheap manufactured good has put increased competitive pressure on Korea industries. As a result, changes in China's exports and consumption expenditures may have a significant effect on Korean exports. Of note is that the exact magnitude of the effects is likely to be different between industries, since the degree of dependence on China as an export market and the degree of competitive pressure imposed by China are different across industries.This article provides industry-level evidence on the long-run effects of China's exports and consumption expenditures on Korean exports, using the fully-modified generalized method of moments (FM-GMM) proposed by Kitamura and Phillips (1997).2) The estimation results suggest that the effect of China's exports is quite different across industries, with the mean effect statistically indistinguishable from zero. In contrast, China's consumption expenditure has a significant and positive effect on Korean exports in most industries. Interestingly, in both cases, the magnitude of the effect is much larger in heavy manufacturing, capital and intermediate goods industries than in light manufacturing and consumption goods industries, reflecting the characteristics of vertical production linkages between China and Korea.The remainder of this article is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a descriptive discussion of the characteristics of China's exports and domestic consumption expenditures as well as Korea's exports to China. Section 3 performs an econometric analysis of the role of China in Korean exports. Section 4 concludes the article.