An Analysis on Macroeconomic Effects of Free Trade Arrangements of Korea, China, and Japan Using the GTAP CGE Model
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Cin Beom-Cheol 
Published: June 2018

East Asian countries including Korea were mainly interested in multilateral cooperation trade policy under the GATT/WTO system in early 1990s. Due to Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, however, their interests were changed toward bilateral and regional free trade arrangements, development of regional financial arrangements, and regional crisis prevention and management capability. Korean government, since the Korean financial crisis in 1997, has emphasized more on regional cooperation trade policy rather than multilateral cooperation so as to minimize negative effects caused by other FTAs. As the first bilateral free trade arrangements, the Korea-Chile FTA(free trade agreement) were effective from 2004, three more FTAs, with Singapore, EFTA, and ASEAN, have come into effect and Korea has been further negotiating free trade arrangements with Mexico, Peru, Australia, New Zealand, GCC, and Canada.
Korean government has considered FTAs among Korea, China and Japan very important not only because the free trade area of them, if it were built, would be the third largest economic bloc in the world in terms of their GDPs but also they are increasingly interdependent, economically and politically. Both China and Japan are major trading partners to Korea. In 2008, China and Japan is the first and the second largest export market to Korea and the first and third largest importing partner. Furthermore, Korea is also one of major foreign investors in China and the third largest importing partners to Japan.
Despite the importance of either bilateral or trilateral FTAs among Korea, China and Japan, their economic effects have not been evaluated enough yet in contrast with much debate on the Korea-U.S. FTA or the Korea-EU FTA. In particular, as most of studies did not take into account the impacts of worldwide tariff cuts due to free trade arrangements pervasive in the 2000s, especially among East Asian countries, and thus the macroeconomic effects of the Korea-China-Japan FTA would be incorrectly estimated. It has been argued that the economic effects of the Korea-China-Japan FTA would not be fully examined for lack of information about the content and negotiation process between them, which should have been provided by government.
This paper critically examines the macroeconomic effects of the free trade area among Korea, China and Japan and bilateral FTAs between them using the GTAP CGE model under various scenarios including both the Korea-Chile and the Korea-ASEAN FTAs which are currently in effect. In simulating economic effects of such free trade arrangements, the paper uses the GTAP static CGE model based on a new GTAP data set. The paper comparatively analyzes the macroeconomic effects of the bilateral and regional free trade arrangements of the three countries can be caused by either tariff reduction or elimination.
Most of all, the GTAP CGE simulated results show that under the assumption of the full elimination of tariffs in all agricultural and manufacturing sectors except the service industries, Korea's real GDP would be expected to increase by 0.28~0.65% due to the Korea-China FTA or the Korea-Japan FTA and by 0.07~0.60% due to the free trade arrangement of the three countries. The results indicate that Korean government might overestimate the macroeconomic effects of the FTAs among the three East Asian countries and therefore it should re-examine the FTA policy strategies.
Second, the CGE simulation results indicate that the economic effects of the Korea-China FTA in terms of a change of GDPs are expected to be larger than those of the Korea-Japan FTA.
Next, the simulation results show that both the Korea-China FTA and the Korea-Japan FTA would not be complementary. The economic effects of the Korea-China FTA would be offset by the Korea-Japan FTA. This implies that there is no robust evidence for government argument that both the FTAs should have complementary effects.