| 摘要 |
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1. Background and Research Questions
Korea signed it��s the first Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Chile, which came into effect in 2004. After this, Korea has actively participated in FTA with many countries and regions. FTAs with Singapore, EFTA, and ASEAN are already effective, and FTA negotiation with two significant economic players, the United States of America (USA) and European Union (EU), had concluded. In addition, the possibility and necessity of Korea-China-Japan FTA has been analyzed jointly by three countries. On the one hand, Korea set up a ��Low Carbon Green Growth�� as a national agenda, and made the announcement of 30% reduction target of GHG emissions compared to the business as usual (BaU) by 2020. The target, however, is strongly ambitious in the view of facts that the GHG emissions are doubled during last 15 years.
The purpose of this study is to analyze the mutual relationship between FTA and energy consumption and GHG emissions. Since FTA has affected economy, international trade and industrial structure of Korea, the energy demand and GHG emissions of Korea also would be affected. These impacts should be reflected to the process of development and implementation of mid- and long-term national energy plans and policies. Therefore, This study analyze the impacts and implications of FTA to the domestic energy demand and supply system and GHG emissions, and then provide the background information on dealing with future FTA negotiation, energy policies and climate change mitigation.
2. Methodology
This study first assessed the impacts of FTA on domestic economy, industrial structure, domestic energy consumption and GHG emissions by using qualitative methods, and it also analyzed the current situation of Korean FTA policies including FTAs with USA, EU, China and Japan which are big partners to Korea in terms of international trade. It also found that most recent studies assert that the real gross domestic product (GDP) of Korea will be increased significantly by entering into force the FTA with those countries.
For quantitative analysis, this study developed KEEI-GCGE which is multi-sector, multi-region recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and analyzed the impacts of various FTA cases such as Korea-USA, Korea-EU and Korea-China-Japan FTA on economies, industrial structure, domestic energy demand and supply and GHG emissions of directly related countries. Based on the results of this analysis, the mutual relationship among FTA energy demand/supply structure and GHG emissions in Korea is analyzed.
3. Major Findings and Policy Implications
When all the three major FTAs (Korea-USA, Korea-EU and Korea-China-Japan) come into effect, the real GDP, energy consumption, and GHG emissions of Korea are found to increase by 2.04%, 3.33% and 1.53% respectively compared to BaU in 2020. Energy intensity of Korea is projected to increase by 1.27%, while carbon intensity is estimated to decrease by 0.50% compared to BaU in 2020. The improvement of carbon intensity is led by the change of industrial structure toward low carbon basis followed by FTAs. On the one hand, the increase of energy consumption caused by FTAs is led by the increase of demand for coal and oil compared to other energy sources.
In case of Korea-China-Japan FTA, the economic activity, energy consumption and GHG emissions are found to expand significantly, while the extent of impacts on energy consumption and GHG emissions is bigger than that on real GDP in Korea. Therefore, energy and carbon intensities of Korea are projected to worsen. In case of Korea-USA and Korea-EU FTAs, however, those intensities are found to be improved. This is because those FTAs generate more economic benefits to Korea than Korea-China-Japan FTA and lead insignificant change of energy consumption and GHG emissions in Korea.
In sum, FTAs promoted by Korean government will change the level and structure of energy consumption and GHG emissions significantly as well as the economic and industrial structure of Korea. This implies, therefore, that the future development and implementation of various mid- and long-term national energy plans and policies must take into account those impacts caused by FTAs. For example, the impacts of FTA on specific industry and firm are necessary to be reflected on setting the target of energy conservation and/or GHG emission reduction for Negotiated Agreement which is one of the major climate change mitigation policies in Korea.
4. Suggestions for Further Studies
Some previous studies argue that economic benefits of FTA on Korean economy, projected by other studies, are overestimated. This study tried to check this argument by using GTAP version 6.0 and 7.0 databases separately. It found the argument to be supported when the GTAP versions 7.0 is used, but it also found the domestic energy consumption and GHG emissions still to increase significantly. The main results, therefore, are still justified. However, future study needs to analyze the fundamental reasons causing the difference of impacts. In addition, this study emphasized the impacts of FTA to be reflected to domestic energy and climate change mitigation policies. The future study also needs to generate the detail policy recommendation on this matter.
Language : Korean |
