강원도 주요 수출품의 국제경쟁력 분석

Analysis on the International Competitiveness of Major Exports of Gangwon Province

A great number of regions within a country have expanded their business activities beyond their national border. The internationalizing activity of the regions is called “glocalization,” and becomes very pervasive recently. However, studies on international competitiveness of the regions are almost none. Until now, analysis of international competitiveness is based mainly on the comparative advantage of a country. However, the comparative advantages of regions of a country are different from that of the country, due to the difference in their geo-economics and factor endowments. That is why the international competitiveness of a region needs to be separate from that of the country. This paper introduces a new index, RRCA(‘regional’ revealed comparative advantage) for a region, based on the widely-used RCA(revealed comparative advantage) index for a country. This paper further examines the validity of the RRCA index by applying it in analyzing the international competitiveness of Gangwon province’s major exports. The result shows that Gangwon province has different pattern of trade behavior compared to the nation as a whole, Korea. In particular, through dynamic analysis of the RRCA with corresponding TSI(trade specialization index), this paper could identify that RRCA well reflects the reality of exporting behavior of Gangwon province. With a simple regression of the over-time changes in RRCAs, the empirical result also provides the evidence that the comparative advantages of Gangwon Province are getting strengthened over time.