한일자유무역협정의 환경파급효과에 관한 비교연구

Abstract

Since the World Summit on Sustainable Development(WSSD) in 2002 endorsed the importance of mutual supportiveness between environmental protection and promotion of sustainable development under the open and non-discriminatory multilateral trading system, the environmental impacts of trade liberalization have become a theme of heated debate at diverse global, regional and national fora focusing on trade and environment. Having finished its own environmental impact assessment of the current multilateral trade negotiation under the DDA(Doha Development Agenda) in WTO, Korea is now implementing a series of quantitative analysis on the environmental impacts of a free trade agreement. Japan is also trying to introduce an environmental review process in its free trade agreement policy, after having concluded its first free trade agreement with Singapore. The current study on the environmental impact of trade liberalization between Korea and Japan has been implemented by the joint expert meeting composed of experts in the Korea Environment Institute, Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan. The joint expert meeting shared the view that environmental review on the FTA would be very important in designing flanking environmental policies and measures to realize mutual supportiveness of trade and environment, and decided to implement a comparative study on the air pollution impact resulting from a free trade agreement between Korea and Japan. In the study, a comparative analysis of industry and bilateral trade structure between Korea and Japan was made as a background of environmental impact analysis. The air pollution inventories of Korea and Japan based on the Korean I-O table classification were harmonized and compared. The intertemporal change in industrial emission structure between 1995 and 2000 showed that there had been an important technological progress in managing air pollution. The air pollution effect was calculated by combining emission coefficient per unit of production and output change after free trade. The emission coefficient per unit of production was obtained from the related energy consumption survey. In general, the emission coefficient of Japan is lower than that of Korea for a given industry, which reveals a inter-industrial difference in emission coefficient for a given air pollutant in a country. These two kinds of difference were supposed to play a key role in determining aggregated air pollution impact of industrial output change after trade liberalization. The output change by industry after free trade was calculated from the free trade simulation using a standard computable general equilibrium model developed by GTAP. The standard CGE model could be characterized by comparative static type and perfect competitive market assumption. The result showed that free trade between Korea and Japan can mitigate air pollution, and economic gains from trade represented by +1.17% and +0.21% increase of GDP respectively. After free trade, the specialization structure of Korea and Japan moved to less pollution intensive one, and the mitigation of air pollution in Japan revealed less important than that of Korea. This results might show one of the interesting cases that the free trade and environmental protection could be mutually supportive. But the generalization of the result obtained by the current study needs much precaution. The simulation result from CGE type model is highly dependant on the value of various elasticities not always estimated econometrically but sometimes chosen arbitrary by researchers. The second limit of the current study is that it used a multi-regional general equilibrium model and could not consider the detailed national information which can be more useful in a two-country general equilibrium model combining two individual national general equilibrium models. The comparative static structure of the model put also certain limit on analysis capacity related to the induced technology transfer or progress after free trade.