• Journal of Korea Port Economic Association
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.111-125
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• 2012

This study investigates the behavioral characteristic difference of the container volumes of three ports-Gwangyang, Incheon, and Pyeongtaek-Dangjin. All series span the period January 2003 to December 2011. I first test whether the series are stationary or not. I can reject the null hypothesis of a unit root in each of the level variables and of a unit root for the residuals from the cointegration at the 5 percent significance level. I hitherto make use of error-correction model and find that Gwangyang port is the slowest in adjusting the short-run disequilibrium, whereas the adjustment speed of Incheon is much faster than that of Gwangyang. The impulse response functions indicate that container volumes increase only a little to the negative shocks in exchange rate, while they respond positively to the shocks in the business activity in a great magnitude and decay very slowly to its pre-shock level. meaning that the shocks last very long. The accumulative response to the exchange rate increase of 20 won per dollar and the 5 point industrial production increase is the smallest in Gwangyang, no more than a half of that of two ports. The intervention-ARIMA models also forecast that Gwangyang port will have much lower growth rate than Incheon and Pyeongtaek-Dangjin port in trading volumes.