Korea Trade Review (무역학회지)

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A Study on the Strategic Trade Policy of Korea, China and Japan in the Era of Digital Trade

디지털무역 시대의 한국·중국·일본의 전략적 무역정책에 관한 연구

  • Jia-Jia Liu (Graduate school of Business Administration, Kyungnam University) ;
  • Nak-Hyun Han (Department of International Trade and Logistics, Kyungnam University)
  • Received : 2022.12.11
  • Accepted : 2022.12.27
  • Published : 2022.12.30
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Abstract

There are two aspects of digital trade: the digitalisation of goods/services being traded and the digitalisation of the transactional act. Digital data (i.e. machine-readable industrial data and transactional data) is the major driving force for both aspects of digital trade. Digital data is a non-rivalrous input, whether for production or marketing activities, and is thus able to be used by many firms or government agencies without limiting the use of others. Digital platforms provide online infrastructure for the interactions between groups, for instance, consumers and producers. The externality effect refers to the situation in which prosperity in one group on a given platform will improve the returns of other groups on the same platform. In the era of the data-driven economy, strategic trade policy can involve data-related policies. The major objective of these policies is to improve the competitiveness of domestic firms. For instance, firms may be subsidised if they use cloud services provided by specific platforms. This strand of strategic trade policies might be useful for increasing the competitiveness of small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) via the digitalisation of production/marketing processes. Alternatively, strategic trade policy may also exploit the externality effect via platform economy-related policies. Further, some countries may form data coalitions to facilitate cross-border data flow. This paper uses cases in Asian countries to illustrate which role these strategic trade policies can play in the digital economy.

Keywords

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