The changing pattern of intra-regional trade in Northeast Asia

초록

This paper explains the sources of rapidly increasing intra-regional trade in Northeast Asia by using the intensity approach to the analysis of bilateral trade. Despite the expectation that the regional countries would have become more competitive with each other in the process of industrial upgrading toward more capital-intensive and technologically sophisticated manufactures trade complementarity has been extremely high and even further increased. This surprising aspect is attributed to the continual interplay between complementarity and competition among the regional countries in different stage of industrialization. Accordingly, intra-industry trade within manufactures becomes to prevail in Northeast Asia. However, country bias in regional trade is still low, as evidenced by the lower actual value of trade intensity than the potential value expected from the degree of complementarity. Given the low degree of natural resistances to regional trade, the low country bias is due to the high degree of government-initiated resistances. The finding of this paper strongly suggesats the closer cooperation in the institutional arrangement to eliminate governmental resistances and to exploit thr potentials for intra-regional trade to the full.