R&D Expenditure, International Trade and Economic Growth: Korea's Experience

Purpose - The purpose of this research is to investigate whether Korea's economic growth can be explained by the endogenous growth theory. Specifically, we test whether R&D expenditure has a positive and significant effect on the economic growth. Research design, data, and methodology - We hypothesize that R&D expenditure has a positive effect on the economic growth after adding control variables in the growth equation. Korean annual data from 1963 to 2011 from Science and Technology Annual of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, the Bank of Korea, etc. are used. We estimate the growth equation by GMM in addition to OLS. Results - We found that R&D expenditure has a positive and significant effect on the economic growth after adding the ratio of investment to GDP, the ratio of FDI to GDP, the ratio of government expenditure to GDP, inflation and the ratio of trade openness to GDP as control variables in the growth equation. Conclusions - Our results show that Korea's rapid economic growth for the past five decades can be explained by the R&D-based endogenous economic growth theory. Our results suggest that the policy attention of the Korean government be paid to R&D promotion.