Publications
Policy Analyses
Author PARK Sunghoon, HAN Hongyul, SONG Yoocheul, KANG Moonsung, and SONG Backhoon Series 17-04 Language Korean Date 2017.12.27
The international trade policy environment has deteriorated continuously over the past few years. The world economy witnessed a continuous increase of protectionist trade policy measures in may countries, especially since the outbreak of the 2009 Global Financial Crisis. In addition, the still on-going Eurozone’s Sovereign Debt Crisis has led to substantial weakening of EU member states’ purchasing power, thereby contracting their overall import demand. The newly-launched Trump Administration of the US has consistently implemented ‘America-first policy’ and ‘unilateralism’ in its pursuit of external economic policies, thus further jeopardizing the international trade environment that had already been suffering from a number of threats mentioned above. Especially, the US cancelled its signature to the already negotiated Trans-pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, and successively started to implement Trump’s promise of either cancelling or renegotiating a few seemingly unfavorable trade agreements, such as the NAFTA and KORUS FTA. All these have shattered the stability of the multilateral global trading system, which has long been supported by the strong leadership displayed by the open and liberal trade policy of the US.
The ‘egoistic’ trade policy of the US has had deep impacts in the global trading system on the one hand, and the trade policies of many countries on the other. Partly influenced by the US move, many countries, regardless of their level of economic development, have resorted strongly to trade protectionism over an extended period, and did not yet come back to their traditional trade policy line. Even the G20 countries, that are supposed to show exemplary economic and trade policies, have been unable to keep their frequent promises to standstill and roll back protectionist trade policy measures. The soaring of ‘Isolationism’, which was expressed most impressively by the Brexit decision of the United Kingdom, is an additional factor that has the potential to further suppress the global economic and trade environment. The world economy will receive a big blow if more countries want to pull their membership out of the EU, and therefore has been watching the process of Brexit negotiation with great interest.
On the other hand, the following two new developments are calling for more dedicated policy responses worldwide: Firstly, we have been observing an increasing fragmentation of production activities based on the expansion of 'global value chains'. Secondly, the policy of 're-shoring' with the view to expanding their economic growth potential has become increasingly prevalent in the world economy. The emergence of China as a leading economic powerhouse and ‘Make in India’ initiative of the Modi government are only two of many compelling outcomes of this new trend, which has therefore been posing enormous challenges to Korea’s road to achieving the path of sustainable development.
With the overall theme of 'Korea’s new trade policy direction under changing international trade environment,' this study pursued to provide policy consultation to the question of 'how can the Korean economy and more specifically Korea’s trade policy address the continuous weakening of locational advantages caused by the challenges mentioned above?' For this purpose, Chapter 2 of this study characterizes main features of recent changes in the world economic and trade order. A strong focus was given here to the analysis of the trends and implications of ‘global value chains (GVCs)’ and ‘re-shoring’, as well as the changes in the multilateral and regional trading system. Chapter 3 then was devoted to the detailed investigation of new developments in US trade policy and the proliferation of the new protectionism, which have been identified as most significant threats to the outward-oriented economies like Korea. Based on the analysis of chapters 2 and 3, Chapter 4 identifies five challenges facing the Korean economy that bear relevance to trade policy. Based on the insights earned through the previous chapters, Chapter 5 developed the basic framework for the future direction of Korea’s trade policy. Especially, this study presented 3 long-term visions for Korea’s trade policy: ① establishment of an advanced structure of Korea’s trade policy, ② adoption of an inclusive trade policy, and ③ trade policy contributing to the stability of international trade order. Based on these three visions, the research team successfully derived five trade-policy tasks and 9 actions plans. Main rationales and contents are detailed in the report.
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