Recent Economic Crises and Foreign Trade in Major ASEAN Countries

최근 경제위기들과 ASEAN 주요국의 무역

The recent global financial crisis triggered by the sub-prime mortgage debacle in the United States hit hard most ASEAN countries that have just recovered from the unprecedented economic crisis ten years ago. This paper, using individual time-series and panel data from 1990 to 2009, intends to investigate and compare the impacts of the two aforementioned economic crises on trade in the four developing ASEAN countries that encompass Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. In doing so, the paper traces the behaviors of main macroeconomic variables before and after the crises on graphs, and then estimates classical export and import demand functions that include real exchange rate, home and foreign GDPs as explanatory variables. In the estimation functions, two dummy variables are added to consider the effects of the two economic crises separately. Individual country data analyses reveal that by and large the 1997 economic crisis seems hit those ASEAN countries' exports and imports harder than the recent global financial crisis. Surprisingly the recent financial crisis turns out more or less statistically insignificant for those countries' export and import performances. The fixed effect model estimation using panel data of those four ASEAN countries also shows that the 1997 economic crisis had affected exports and imports of those countries negatively while the recent global financial crisis was not statistically significant. These results indicate that overall the effect from the 1997 crisis was more devastating than that of the recent global crisis for those ASEAN countries.