남북한 경제교류와 정치적 분쟁의 인과성 방향

A Causality Direction between the Trade and Conclict in South and North Korea

It is well known that there exist the relations between trade and conflict. However, although trade and conflict are clearly related, it is not clear that whether trade affect conflict, or the other way around, i.e., causality direction. Empirical studies in the literature on the relationship between trade and conflict have largely been confused. While some studies use trade as the dependent variable, others use conflict as the dependent variable. This paper examines if there exits a causal relationship between trade and conflict in South and North Koreas. And if the trade between South and North Korea has influence on conflict between them, we analyze the sign and magnitude of the effect. To analyze this, this paper search for the conflict index and measures of trade: the trade volume of commercial goods, the trade volume of commercial goods is an unstationary data, we use the rate of change of the trade volume. The regression results show that the trade volume of commercial goods has a statistically significant impact on conflict index. One implication of this result is that if the trade volume of commercial goods increases, we would expect to reduce political conflicts between South and North Koreas. On the other hand, the results did not give any evidence for the relationship between conflict and the non-commercial goods trade. Therefore we may conclude that S. Korea s effort to improve the peaceful-relation between South and North Koreas through trade has failed, because the trade of non-commercial goods did not affect on conflict. The empirical results show that the political conflicts between South and North Koreas is influenced substantially by the trade of commercial goods, not by the trade of non-commercial goods. So if the trade volume of commercial goods become lager than the trade volume of non-commercial goods, the inter-Korean trade would play more important roles to reduce political conflicts/or tension between South and North Koreas.