동북아 각국의 농산물 교역과 경쟁력 비교 연구

A Comparative Study on the Agricultural Product Trade and Competitiveness of Northeast Asian Countries

This paper investigates, first of all, the recent trend of the agricultural product trade among Korea, China, and Japan. Then, each country s trade competitivenss is also investigated in terms of three dimensions, that is, productivity, price, and trade performance. According to this research, the productivity of China has increased at the fastest speed, though the productivity of the remaining two countries has also increased. Except the productivity of land, because productivity was calculated as the output per factor input, Japan had the highest productivity based on the absolute amount: China had the lowest while Korea stood in the middle. The price comparison of 27 agricultural products between Korea and China revealed that Korea had 6.1 times as high price level as China. Such a big difference in price level suggests that, in spite of potential tariff and non-tariff barriers, the size of trade between these two countries may increase significantly in the future. Of course, the potential direction of trade would be the export from China to Korea and Japan. Such results were also confirmed in the analysis of trade performance in which TII and RCA were used. That is, in most agricultural products, China had higher export RCA while Korea and Japan had relatively higher import RCA. The trend which emerged over the past few years also indicates clearly that Korea and Japan will be fewer and fewer competitive items while Chinese agricultural products will replace those of Korea and Japan, leading to increased influence of China in the Northeast Asian agricultural product market.