남한, 북한, 중국의 양국 간 경제적 상호의존 및 의존관계 분석

An Analysis on the Dyadic Economic Interdependence and Dependence among South Korea, North Korea, and China

Over the past few decades, economic interdependence and dependence through trade between states have been applied to explain many interstate political relations such as conflicts, or cooperations between trading states. Among others, How economic interdependence and dependence between states affecting political relations has been viewed differently from different theoretical perspectives. Liberals argue that heightened interdependence fosters cooperative political relations. But, the critics of this argument maintain that increased economic dependence instead of interdependence generates political dependence. However a number of empirical studies have attempted to fill this disparity, but the studies appear to be incompatible results. So the source of contradictory findings is a subject of considerable debate, and has been identified variously. Among those, the disparity in the empirical findings is a set of important questions concerning how to define and measure economic interdependence and dependence. In this paper, I therefore conceptualized and measured the dyadic economic interdependence and dependence among South Korea, North Korea, and China based on the Barbieri’s and Oneal & Russett’s methods. The results of measuring in economic relations indicate that North Korea depends, increasingly and heavily, on China. The results also show that North Korea depends, relatively not heavily, on South Korea. On the other hand, The measurements reveal that economic relationship between South Korea and China is interdependency, but South Korea is becoming to depend on China as trading between two is extending asymmetrically. These empirical findings indicate that North Korea is expected to depends heavily on China as North Korea’s economic crisis would be continued. And such economic dependence leads North Korea to depend politically on China.