Purpose - Since China has been South Korea's biggest export destination, uncertainty shocks originating from it would influence South Korea's exports. This paper evaluates the effects of China's economic policy uncertainty on Korea's exports to explore the transmission channels. Design/methodology - Incorporating endogeneities and nonlinearities, this study employs a quarterly time-varying parameters vector autoregressive model to investigate the relationships between China's economic policy uncertainty and Korea's exports, where the overparameterization due to time-varying specifications is overcome by a novel stochastic model specification search framework. According to previous theoretical studies, this paper assesses two channels, demand shock channel and exchange rate channel, through which foreign uncertainty affects Korea's exports. This paper identifies the primary drivers of Korea's aggregate exports and analyzes the rationales for the time-variant impacts of China's economic policy uncertainty on Korea's exports to China. Findings - Our empirical results reveal that Korea's aggregate exports are less responsive to China's economic policy uncertainty shocks and significantly move together with global demand. In contrast, its bilateral exports to China are highly responsive in a negative and time-variant way. Moreover, Chinese investment is an important channel through which China's economic policy uncertainty affects Korea's exports to China after 2010. Further, the time-variant effects of China's economic policy uncertainty on Korea's exports to China are related to changes in China's foreign trade policies, global economic conditions, and China's degree of economic freedom. Originality/value - Few previous studies touch the effects of external uncertainty shocks on South Korea's exports. This paper attempts to fill this gap and explicitly investigate the impacts of China's economic policy uncertainty on Korea's exports from a time-varying perspective. As Korea is an export-oriented economy, this study provides insights for the Korean government to understand the transmissions of external uncertainty better.

Purpose - This paper investigated the effect of international trade affects income inequality. It also compares the different effects between developing and developed countries over the period from 2005 to 2014 for 58 countries. Design/methodology - The econometric estimation was used to identify the relationship between export, import, FDI, GDP, unemployment and income inequality. In this empirical analysis, we utilized a Vector Error Correction (VEC) model using panel data. Findings - The findings show that there is a close correlated between trade and income inequality. The higher export ratio of GDP tends to have a 1.79 times more income inequality in developing countries than in developed countries. The higher import ratio of GDP tends to have a 2.44 times higher income inequality in developing countries than in developed countries. Further, Increasing FDI tend to have an approximately 1.43 times higher income inequality in developing countries than in developed countries. Korea is in the middle of developed and developing countries' result. Originality/value - To correct the global income inequality regarding trade, developed countries' proactive trade policies, such as granting preferential tariff benefits to developing countries, are likely to be needed and Income Safety Net in international trade must be taken into account.

Purpose - The rapid rise of e-commerce enterprises has led to the development of the logistics industry. At the same time, some enterprises are motivated by the interests to start reducing costs and inputs, which on the contrary leads to low quality of service, thus reducing customer satisfaction. In recent years, vicious competition, violent express delivery and lack of professionalism in the logistics market have led to high annual customer complaint rate, which has resulted in the company losing many loyal customers, but also unable to obtain new customers. Therefore, to pay attention to and understand the psychological needs of customers and improve the quality of logistics distribution service has become a pressing problem for Every express company. Design/methodology - By analyzing the problems existing in logistics distribution of express companies, this paper explores various factors affecting customer satisfaction and takes consumer sentiment as a mediating variable. Through questionnaires to collect relevant data, put forward hypotheses for empirical analysis, use two different software including SPSS 21.0 and AMOS 21.0 to analyze the information, draw conclusions and make recommendations. Findings - According to the above research results, the reliability, convenience, efficiency, professional can have a positive impact on customer satisfaction through the mediating effect of their sentiment, convenience and professional on consumer sentiment and satisfaction are more significant. Originality/value - This paper the establishment of distribution service indicators related to customer satisfaction and empirical analysis can not only enrich and supplement the distribution service quality indicator system studied by the former, but also provide a theoretical basis for future research.

Purpose - The UCP is recognized as the governing law for L/C transactions, but it covers only the general details of the transaction and does not cover all complex practices. In view of this limitation, this paper examines a negotiation transaction which is most actively utilized in L/C transactions via a thorough review of the UCP provisions, analyzes the problems of the negotiation clause in the UCP, and suggests appropriate countermeasures to deal with unnecessary litigation costs. By doing so, the parties involved in the negotiation transaction would be able to avoid financial costs such as having to pay for lawsuits. Design/methodology - The present study first differentiates the general types of L/Cs (e.g., sight payment L/C, deferred payment L/C, acceptance L/C, and negotiation L/C), explains and the Article 2 and Article 12(b) of the UCP 600 where the term 'negotiation' is used, digs into the drawbacks of 'negotiation' occurring under the UCP 600, and discusses solutions to the problems found by analyzing the drawbacks descriptively. Findings - After a review of the UCP provisions on negotiation in detail, several possible problems which may occur in practice were discovered. First, as the UCP stipulates, the negotiating bank will want to delay payment to the maximum extent possible and make payment on the banking day on which the issuing bank reimburses the amount. This may lead the beneficiary towards bankruptcy or put it in financial crisis. Second, when a fraudulent transaction occurs, the negotiating bank can neither request the issuing bank to reimburse nor can it exercise its recourse right against the beneficiary because it has obtained all the rights of the beneficiary by purchasing the documents. Third, there is a practice in which the beneficiary sells the documents to its transaction bank which is not the nominated bank if the nominated bank specified in the credit is located in a third country or the exporter has no relationship with the nominated bank in the credit. In this case, whether to accept this and reimburse the non-nominated negotiating bank entirely depends on the issuing bank's decision even though such practice frequently occurs in Korea. Originality/value - There has been little research effort pertaining to negotiation transactions in detail even though negotiation L/C transactions account for around 70% in world trade notwithstanding deferred payment L/Cs and acceptance L/Cs that are also negotiated in practice. Thus, if the negotiations clause under the UCP 600 provisions were reviewed and the drawbacks of the negotiation transactions most actively used in L/C transactions were identified and examined, specific countermeasures could ultimately help smoothen the operation of L/C transactions and prevent financial losses.

Purpose - Multi-National Enterprises (MNEs) tend to face a high level of institutional pressures in regions with high institutional development level. When complying with institutional pressures, firms try to make decisions to maximize profit while minimizing the risks to them. The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of the institutional development level on institutional compliance timing by MNEs and the relationship between compliance speed and corporate performance. Design/methodology - The research focuses on three main variables, which are the institutional development level (as a determination of the institutional pressure level), the firm's compliance speed (as a determination of the compliance timing), and the firm's financial performance (as a determination of the corporate performance). We collected 19,869 firm-level data from CSMAR (the China Stock Market and Accounting Research), 6,922 CSR data from RKS (the Rankins CSR Ratings), and province and city-level data from the NERIM (National Economic Research Institute Index of Marketization) and NBSC (National Bureau of Statistics of China). The firms in China were chosen for analysis, and the analysis period was from 2008 to 2017. Random Effects GLS Regression was used to test the relationships among the variables. Findings - This study examined the effect of the institutional development level on the firm's compliance speed, together with the effect of compliance speed on the firm's financial performance of the MNEs in China. We found that the institutional development level positively influenced firms' financial performances, which means the firms' financial performances are better in the region with a high institutional development level. The compliance speed of institutional practice by firms was faster in the higher level of institutional development. However, the firm's delayed compliance led to better financial performance. Originality/value - Studies in the resource dependence view of Institutional Theory often fall short in understanding the theory by overlooking the firm's active decision-making. Thus, the findings do not present a full scope of corporate performance in this regard. This study not only found a way to test the role of a firm's independent decision-making (i.e., compliance timing) when facing the institutional pressure but also prove the significant role of the compliance timing on corporate performance. Also, we were able to test the effect of institutional development level, controlling location-specific variables because we used CSR performance data for MNEs operating in China. Lastly, by doing the above, the findings of this study suggest practical implications to the industry practitioners in MNEs.