The Impact of Free Trade Agreements on Trade in Goods in the Agricultural Sector of the Republic of Korea. The KORUS FTA and the KOREU FTA

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Economics - Foreign Trade Theory, Trade Policy, grade: 2,0, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Chair of International Finance), course: Bachelorseminar: Trade Policy: Topics in Trade Policy, language: English, abstract: Over the last twenty years South Korea has signed several free trade agreements, including one with the U.S. in 2007 and one with the E.U. in 2010, which include tariff reductions. This thesis examines the impact of tariff reductions through free trade agreements on the value of imports of a single product representative for the agricultural sector through several regression analyses using a Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood estimator.
Besides the two exporters of interest, the European Union and the United States, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Australia complement the data set as reference value. This study starts with a literature review on existing literature on the two free trade agreements and the effects of free trade on the agricultural economy. In chapter three an independent investigation is conducted explaining the background to the two free trade agreements and, more generally, the effects of trade liberalization on the agricultural sector. The following chapter describes the course of the investigation with the explanation of the operational variables and the data using descriptive statistics. The data is used in an estimation model to evaluate the effect of a reduction of tariff rates according to an agreement on the value of imports. The individual components of the estimation model are explained in more detail, followed by a presentation of the results of the estimation using the STATA statistics program. The last chapter concludes the whole investigation, together with considerations on possible further studies of this topic.