A Study on Economic Linkages between Korea and Japan

This paper investigates how Japanese economic shocks affect the Korean economy and analyzes the channels through which they are transmitted. Also, the relative importance of domestic and foreign shocks on the dynamics of certain key macro variables is investigated. The techniques of vector autoregression (VAR) are employed to investigate the international transmission of economic disturbances. The VAR methodology is a particularly useful means for characterizing the dynamic relationships among economic variables without imposing certain types of theoretical restrictions. The dynamic effects of Japanese economic shocks on the Korean economy are evaluated by estimating variance decompositions (VDCs) and impulse response functions (IRFs). This study supports the notion of economic dependence of a small open economy such as Korea to a large economy such as Japan.