Trade strategy of European Union and the impact of EU-South Korea FTA

When the global financial erupted, European Union (EU) had suffered from unprecedented economic downturn. Unemployment soared and consumption declined, causing negative effects on Europe’s per capita income growth. EU then started to realize the need for the utilization of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), to alleviate the low growth trend of European economy. As the first initiative of EU Global Strategy, which was intended to significantly expand EU’s export markets to offshore countries through FTAs, South Korea was selected as one of the first targets. After eight rounds of FTA negotiations started from 2006, FTA between EU and South Korea came into effect in 2011. Using UN Comtrade’s export and import data from 2000 to 2017, this paper discusses about changes in trade patterns of EU and South Korea before and after the EU-South Korea FTA, and empirically analyzes the impact of EU-South Korea FTA. The results of our regression models show that the FTA indeed has positive effects on growth of both trade volume and trade share in the world, between South Korea and the EU, with significance. The fact that there were increases not only in commodity trade, but also in service goods trade and foreign direct investment suggests that the virtuous cycle of EU-South Korea FTA can expand to related areas. Furthermore, as South Korea is East Asia’s FTA-centered country which signed FTAs with both US and China, the two largest economies in the world, the indirect benefits from the EU-South Korea FTA will become greater for the EU. This advantage is expected to help creating a virtuous cycle that induces economic growth of EU through increases in trade, productivity, and job creation.