Korea’s export performance has exhibited a remarkable downturn since the end of 2014, declining over the 12 months of 2015 by about eight per-cent in nominal terms. Conjecturing this to reflect depreciation of the Jap-anese Yen and, during the second half of 2015, of the Chinese Yuan cou-pled with a sudden decline in China’s import demand, we apply an Armington (1969)-type trade model to match international trade data with input-output tables in order to identify the sources of export variation in Korea and, as a bridge between the theoretical model and empirical input-output table, to analyze the effect of income (GDP) and exchange rate variation. The major findings of the present study are three-fold. First, the estimated long-run elasticity (0.067) of trading partners’ GDP on Korea’s export is a lot smaller than the static short-run elasticity (0.755) of their GDP in nominal terms and the estimate of static short-run elasticity (0.462) of GDP in real terms. Second, we find that Korean Won’s real deprecia-tion helps boost Korea’s real exports in the short-run but its effect turns out to have a slightly negative effect in the long-run which implies that the positive effect of real depreciation of the Won may not last long. Third, we also find that a depreciation of Japanese Yen and Chinese Yuan in nominal terms has negative effects on Korean exports in the short-run, but the Jap-anese Yen’s real depreciation facilitates increases in Korea’s real exports consistently in both the short-run and long-run. The effects of the ex-change rate variation cannot be unidirectional in both short-run and long-run because the variation affects the relative competitiveness of imported intermediate goods. According to our findings, Korean exports, given a positive income shock in trading partner countries, tend to be replaced by foreign alternatives which reflects a tightening of technology as well as price competition in the global market, and suggests as an optimal export promotion strategy for Korea the pursuit of technological progress and a diversification policy that encompasses both destination and export prod-ucts.
 

Contents

Executive Summary

I. Introduction

II. A Trade Model with Armington Elasticities

III. Data: Direction of Trade Statistics and Input-Output Tables

IV. Estimation and Simulation Results in a Static Model
1. Estimates of Armington Elasticities in a Static Model with Nominal Variables
2. Estimates of Armington Elasticities in a Static Model with Real Variables

V. Estimation of Armington Elasticities in a Dynamic Model
1. A Dynamic Error Correction Model of Armington Elasticities
2. Estimates of Armington Elasticities in a Dynamic Model

VI. Summary and Policy Implications