The Impact of Covid-19 and its policy response on Korea's export

Abstract

The lockdown policies, which are composed of various measures like workplace closing, cancel public events, stay-at-home requirements, are adopted to block the transmission of COVID-19. It may succeed in blocking the infections, but it has negative impacts on the global economy in terms of production and consumption. In this research, the author tries to focus on the impacts of COVID-19 and its policy responses on Korea’s exports by using COVID-19 case and death data, policy response data from OxCGRT, immobility data from Google. The importing countries’ COVID-19 and the policy responses have negative impacts on Korea’s exports even though some of the indicators are not statistically significant. Also the country groups such as OECD, EU, ASEAN, and OPEC have shown the mitigation of negative impacts of COVID-19 and its policy responses and immobility. Korea’s COVID-19 situation, its policy responses and immobility in the workplace have positive impacts on Korea''s exports. The author also tries to check the baseline’s results by doing the estimation with product division, adding time-lag variables, and dividing the region by capital and non-capital area and confirms that the direction of coefficients except medical industries. This study contributes to suggest rough ideas about the impact of lockdown measures on Korea’s exports.