Chankwon Bae

Regional Borders and Trade in Asia

This paper investigates the effect of regional borders on trade in Asia. The regional borders define the three regions of Asia : South, Southeast, and East Asia. Regional trade indicates the flows of trade within a region, whereas regional border trade means trade across regions. A gravity model is augmented with the region dummies to estimate the regional border effects that capture any and all time-invariant factors promoting or impeding regional trade. The main finding is that regional border effects are asymmetric on the three regions in Asia. There is a large and significant regional border effect on South Asia, small on Southeast Asia, and negligibly negative on East Asia. The significant and positive regional border effect in South Asia suggests that countries share intrinsic factors facilitating trade between the countries in this region. Although the regional border effect of Southeast Asia is positive, its magnitude shows little difference between its regional trade and regional border trade. Finally, the estimate on East Asia presents a completely different picture from the actual data. It implies that there exist some factors leading to active regional border trade between East Asia and other Asian regions.

The Impact of FTAs on FDI in Korea

This study aims to empirically identify how FTAs affect outward and inward FDI at the bilateral level in Korea, focusing on the agreements with Chile, Singapore, ASEAN, and EFTA.

Trade, Jobs, and E-commerce: Evidence from Korea

This report explores the substitutability/complementarity between e-commerce activity and trade-in-goods/jobs. Although there is a possibility that e-commerce activity could substitute trade in goods and jobs, we found no such evidence in Korea. In other words, the data in Korea shows that e-commerce activity relates positively to trade in goods. At industry-level, e-commerce activity is positively related (at least, neutral depending on industries) to job growth and creation. At firm-level, e-commerce firms hire more workers than non-e-commerce ones. A caveat in interpreting the evidence we found is that the complementarity between e-commerce and trade/jobs can become stronger or weaker as e-commerce activity continues to grow in the future. Nonetheless, a lesson from the evidence we found is that new policies relating to e-commerce should be formulated in connec-tion with trade and jobs. For e-commerce and trade, we suggest that the government encourage firms (small-and-medium-sized firms in particular) to engage actively in cross-border e-commerce export, while it make efforts to streamline customs clearance processes for e-commerce to lower trade barriers. For e-commerce and jobs, we em-phasize the role of labor market polices with vocational training and retraining programs due to labor market reallocation arising from e-commerce.

R&D Spillovers with Endogenous Absorptive Capacity: Lessons for Developing Countries

This paper analyzes the role of absorptive capacity in R&D spillovers through strategic R&D investments in a game-theoretic framework. In the model, a firm’s effective R&D is composed of idiosyncratic R&D, which produces its own innovations, and identical R&D, which improves absorptive capacity. The model shows that in the presence of absorptive capacity firms have a tendency to underinvest (overinvest) in idiosyncratic (identical) R&D relative to the social optimum. As the spillover becomes larger, firms decrease their own R&D while they become more inclined towards strategic exploitation of rivals’ efforts. Since the former effect overpowers the latter, the total amount of R&D decreases as the spillover increases. This is socially undesirable, providing a potential justification for a governmental subsidy for idiosyncratic R&D and a tax on identical R&D. The findings may have important implications for newly industrialized or emerging countries that consider a redirection of national R&D policy and intellectual property rights (IPR) regime.

Localization Strategies in Response to Recent Changes in the Southeast Asian Labor Market Environment

Southeast Asia still has the potential to attract FDI from Korean firms even though the labor market environment has been changing at a very swift pace as of late. For example, as the increase in FDI improves the total factor productivity of firms operating in Southeast Asia, the wages of workers in this region have accordingly skyrocketed. As income growth led workers in the region to devote greater attention to democracy and human rights. Ongoing changes in Southeast Asias labor market are likely to have an adverse impact on Korean firms operating in the region, though the extent of the impact will differ across industries, firm sizes, and technology levels. Therefore, we suggest that government policies for FDI should be redirected to support localization efforts of firms operating in Southeast Asia. As these firms operate in foreign countries, they do not create jobs domestically. The existing literature, however, tells us that they positively affect domestic productivity and employment. This provides a reason for governments, including Korea’s, to identify effective policy measures that can support firms to successfully meet challenges and localize in these ever-changing markets of Southeast Asia.