Disentangling Trade Effects of the Korea: China FTA: Trade Liberalization or Political Conflicts?

Purpose – This paper investigates the trade effect of the Korea-China Free Trade Agreement (KCFTA) which coincides with political conflicts between the two countries due to the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) in Korea. The two events occurred in the same year and both are likely to affect trade between two countries but in opposite directions. Therefore, it is crucial to distinguish between the trade effects from the KCFTA event and those from the THAAD event to evaluate the true FTA effects. However, this would be difficult when using only annual data. Accordingly, ex post studies to examine the trade effects of KCFTA are lacking in trustworthiness while many ex ante studies that conjecture the positive trade effects neglect the THAAD deployment impact. This paper aims to fill that gap. Design/methodology – Given that the KCFTA and THAAD events occurred in the same year but in different months, we use the monthly data from 2000 to 2019 of Korea’s exports to bracket this period. We employ the difference-in-difference (DID) method within a gravity equation specification that uses hi-dimensional fixed effects to address various endogeneity issues and seasonal effects. We identify the net impact of KCFTA ratification from these two near-simultaneous events to quantify the effects of trade liberalization between these two countries. Findings – After isolating the THAAD effects on trade, the analysis creates a positive and statistically significant coefficient estimate of the KCFTA impact. In contrast, failing to isolate the THAAD effect produced a negative and statistically significant coefficient estimate of the KCFTA impact. Our results indicate that KCFTA independently increased Korea’s exports to China by 10.2%, but that this increase was fully mitigated by the THAAD event. Further, our results verify that unobserved heterogeneity and multilateral resistance are technically difficult to account for in those estimations as that rely solely upon annual data, as this type of data are inadequate to control for the potential for endogeneity. Originality/value – This paper is one of the first studies to carefully evaluate the net trade effects of the KCFTA on Korea’s largest trading partner while isolating the impact of simultaneously occurred political events that may influence trade in opposing directions. Our findings indicate that the lack of prior evidence of positive trade effects of the KCFTA when using annual data may be attributed to a failure to identify the impact of each event separately. This analysis supports using the correct modeling specification to avoid misleading conclusions when evaluating any important international trade policy.