• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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• v.47 no.4
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• pp.239-245
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• 2023

This study examined the impact of geopolitical risk on port throughput in Korea. With a high trade-to-GDP ratio, Korea has an open economy. The vast majority of its exports and imports are serviced by maritime transport. Therefore, cargo volume of Korean seaports is highly likely to be affected by changes in global economy resulting from escalation in geopolitical risk. In this regard, this study investigated the relationship between geopolitical risk and port throughput in Korea during the period of 1995-2022. Results indicated that the impact of geopolitical risk on port throughput was not statistically significant. However, the relationship varied by export, import, and ports. Especially, it was revealed that cargo volume of Korean ports was negatively associated with the level of geopolitical risk. In addition, it was also found that geopolitical risk had a negative impact on the unit price of Korean import..

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.155-161
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• 2023

97.5% of our country's exports and 87.2% of imports are transported by sea, making ports an important component of the Korean economy. To efficiently operate these ports, it is necessary to improve the short-term prediction of port water volume through scientific research methods. Previous research has mainly focused on long-term prediction for large-scale infrastructure investment and has largely concentrated on container port water volume. In this study, short-term predictions for petroleum and liquefied gas cargo water volume were performed for Ulsan Port, one of the representative petroleum ports in Korea, and the prediction performance was confirmed using the deep learning model LSTM (Long Short Term Memory). The results of this study are expected to provide evidence for improving the efficiency of port operations by increasing the accuracy of demand predictions for petroleum and liquefied gas cargo water volume. Additionally, the possibility of using LSTM for predicting not only container port water volume but also petroleum and liquefied gas cargo water volume was confirmed, and it is expected to be applicable to future generalized studies through further research.

• Journal of Korea Trade
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• v.26 no.7
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• pp.1-18
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• 2022

Purpose - Recent international studies have largely focused on measuring the welfare gains from increased trade varieties. To adequately capture the variety gains, it is of importance to estimate the elasticity of substitution between varieties of trade goods because it is one of the key parameters to determine the magnitude of the variety gains. Using the import data of South Korea, this paper shows that the elasticities vary substantially across the estimators, which affects the magnitude of the gains from trade. Design/methodology - Empirical studies working on the gains from trade variety have heavily depended on the estimation methods for the elasticity of substitution between trade varieties, developed by Feenstra (1994) and refined by Broda and Weinstein (2006). We estimate and compare the estimated elasticities for 8,945 HS 10 goods of South Korea, obtained from the three estimation methods: Feenstra's weighted least square (F-WLS), Feenstra's feasible generalized least square (F-FGLS), and Broda and Weinstein's feasible generalized least square (BW-FGLS). Findings - Using the estimated elasticities from the F-FGLS, considered as a suitable estimator, A typical Korean consumer saved 228 dollars per year by the greater access to new import varieties. This leads to gains from imported variety of 2.06% of GDP. In 2017, a typical Korean consumer would gain by 611 dollars, compared with 2000. China is the country with the largest contribution (28.4%), followed by Japan and USA. About 50% of all the welfare gains come from the imports from the three main trade partners. The Southern Asian countries are more important to the South Korean welfare gain than the Western European countries. Originality/value - Existing studies have chosen one of the methods without any criterion for the choice and then estimated the elasticities of substitution between varieties of trade goods. This paper focuses on the estimation specifications and methods as the cause of the disparity in estimated elasticities and welfare gains from trade variety. According to the Ramsey RESET and White tests, the F-FGLS estimates are relatively better compared to the F-WLS and BW-FGLS estimates. As another contribution, this paper provides the first measure of the welfare gains from trade variety for South Korea, using the estimated elasticities of substitution between trade varieties.

• Journal of Korea Trade
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.41-60
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• 2022

Purpose - The policy implications of free trade agreements have traditionally been a matter of debate among economists. The official signing of the Korea-China Free Trade Agreement provides economists with a quasi-natural experiment to analyze the FTA's policy effects. This article aims to more accurately understand the impact of Korea's FTA accession on the macro economy. Design/methodology - This study adopts the counterfactual method based on panel data to find common factors in the generation process of macro data to fit the counterfactual path, to accurately evaluate the effect of the macro policy. Findings - Our research results show that the signing of the Korea-China FTA has a relatively significant short-term positive effect on Korea's economic growth. On average, Korea's real GDP growth rate has increased by 2.1%. This study finds evidence in support of FTA signing not having a significant impact on Korea's GDP growth in the long run. Additionally, we evaluated the impact of the FTA on Korea's imports and exports and found that it had a significant positive impact in the short term, but the trade effect of the FTA is significantly affected by the external macro-environment. Originality/value - First, this study uses macro panel data at the national level to examine the impact of the Korea-China FTA on Korea, and more accurately describes the policy effect of the FTA. Second, our empirical results show that the Korea-China FTA policy impact is subject to occasional changes in the external environment, such as the geopolitical conflict (crisis) between Korea and China, and the US-China trade war. Finally, the analysis shows that the short-term effect of FTA is significant but the long-term is uncertain, which provides empirical evidence for the debate on whether joining FTA can promote national economic growth.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.195-221
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• 2023

As the global energy and climate crisis has complicated interests of each country, the agenda that requires a global response has recently been revived. In particular, Korea is highly dependent on energy imports and continues to have high energy consumption, low efficiency of energy consumption, and high greenhouse gas emissions, so innovative and effective energy policies are urgently needed to achieve energy efficiency and carbon neutrality. In this study, among the changes in distributed district energy policy after the integrated energy method was introduced in Korea in the mid-1980's, the case of the "National Heat Map Project" policy implementation is analyzed with a modified multi-flow model. The 10 years of the Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations, the period of study, was a period in which the main paradigm of energy policy shifted to a "distributed energy platform" and policy transitions such as policy agenda setting, policy drift, and policy revision were made. A study on the process would be meaningful.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.14 no.7
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• pp.169-175
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• 2009

In accordance with the promotional strategy of the 'simultaneously occurring and high-level comprehensive FTA that Korean government made clear in the FTA promotion roadmap in 2003, it has already entered into FTA with 22 countries such as Chile, Singapore, EU, MERCOSUR, ASEAN and the like but is progressing or promoting the negotiation about FTA. It is necessary to make efforts to lift all sorts of non-tariff barriers that put restrictions on the import of China with the promotion of the lowering of customs duties in the negotiation of FTA between Korea and China. It is anticipated that imports will be expanded in the manufacturing field as well as agricultural products with the efforts to improve the business management environment of Korean firms within China. Therefore, it is a very important task to make efforts to prevent the roundabout trade made via China by reinforcing the standard and criterion for the origin of country in the Korea China FTA.

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.245-267
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to investigate the current situation of foreign direct investment of Korea based on GVC (Global Value Chain) perspective and to presentthe policy direction. From GVC perspective which comprehensively describes the world's increasing FDI and imports/exports phenomenon since the 2000s, the level of internationalization of Korea is excessively concentrated in trade. Therefore, the expansion of foreign investment (OFDI, IFDI) is urgently needed. The results of regression analysis using data from 50 countries and the international comparison of major countries including Germany, Switzerland, Singapore, etc, showed that the level of foreign direct investment of Korea is 20 to 30 years behind compared to those major countries. Therefore, exploiting the benefits of trade and foreign direct investment at the same time is needed to increase the level of GDP per capita.

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.131-154
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• 2017

In international trade, transportation generally has the largest and direct impact on freight costs. However, it is also sensitive to external factors such as global economic conditions, global trade volume and exchange rate. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the relationship and influence of international trade in terms of external factors that affect the change of imports and exports by marine and air transportation through empirical analysis. In particular, the analysis of the impact of these external factors on marine and air transportation is an important topic when recent exchange rate changes are significant, and it is also necessary to analyze what transportation means are more sensitive to exchange rate changes. In this study, we use the Vector Error Correction Model to analyze the dynamic effects of changes in exchange rate and domestic and international economic conditions on marine and air transportation from January 2000 to March 2017. Respectively. Alos, Impulse response function and variance decomposition were examined.

• Journal of Korea Trade
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.101-118
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• 2023

Purpose - Korea became a trillion-dollar trading country in 2011. With the exponential increase in Korea's trade volume over the past decades, trade-related administrative burdens per capita for Korea Customs became enormous, for which the government established the Single Window, a trade-facilitating system, in 2004 to enhance the efficiency of customs-clearing procedures for traders. This paper focuses on finding whether the Korean Single Window system affects the country's trade facilitation positively through an empirical methodology. Design/methodology - To find empirical evidence that Single Window affects trade facilitation for the customs-clearing procedure, this study assumes that a time-efficient environment enables the handling of the increase in trade volume, under which four independent variables related to import customs-clearing procedures and two dependent variables to import were adopted for empirical analysis. The import customs procedures are classified into four steps from port entry to declaration acceptance. To understand the relationship between variables, scattered plots and correlation coefficients were calculated. Eight hypotheses were set and underwent simple linear regression. The data for analysis were collected by Korea Customs, and were about the lead time of import, the volume of imports in million USD, and the number of import declarations reported to customs offices on a monthly basis from 2005 to 2013. Findings - Six of the eight hypotheses showed the statistically significant result that lead time in the import customs-clearing procedure positively affects the number of import declaration reports and import volume. Specifically, Hypothesis 1, Hypothesis 2, and Hypothesis 3 strongly support the assumption lead time in import customs declaration has an inverse relationship with the number of import declarations, which means that the shorter the import lead time, the more import declaration increases. Research Limitations/Implications - With limited data accessibility to the government's custom-sclearing procedures, only the import lead time for customs clearance were adopted as independent variables. This paper, however, successfully found that the Single Window system contributed to trade facilitation. Originality/value - This study found that the time-saving Single Window system of Korea Customs enables itself to manage an exponentially-increasing trade volume by creating a trade-facilitating environment for customs personnel and traders, which may be a unique implication found through quantitative methodology.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.28 no.7
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• pp.29-37
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• 2023

Due to climate change, interest in crop production and distribution is increasing, and attempts are being made to use bigdata and AI to predict production volume and control shipments and distribution stages. Prediction of agricultural product imports not only affects prices, but also controls shipments of farms and distributions of distribution companies, so it is important information for establishing marketing strategies. In this paper, we create an artificial intelligence prediction model that predicts the future import volume based on the wholesale market melon import volume data disclosed by the agricultural statistics information system and evaluate its accuracy. We create prediction models using three models: the Neural Prophet technique, the Ensembled Neural Prophet model, and the GRU model. As a result of evaluating the performance of the model by comparing two major indicators, MAE and RMSE, the Ensembled Neural Prophet model predicted the most accurately, and the GRU model also showed similar performance to the ensemble model. The model developed in this study is published on the web and used in the field for 1 year and 6 months, and is used to predict melon production in the near future and to establish marketing and distribution strategies.