• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.71-101
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• 2017

Since late 2016, protectionism has been a major trend in world trade with the Great Britain exiting the European Union and the United States electing Donald Trump as the 45th president. Consequently, there has been a huge public outcry regarding the negative prospects of heavy industry firms in Korea, which are highly dependent upon international trade with Western countries including the United States. In light of such trend and concerns, we have tried to predict business performance of heavy industry firms in Korea with data regarding trade policy of the United States. United States International Trade Commission (USITC) levies countervailing duties and anti-dumping duties to firms that violate its fair-trade regulations. In this study, we have performed data analysis with past records of countervailing duties and anti-dumping duties. With results from clustering analysis, it could be concluded that trade policy trends of the Unites States significantly affects the business performance of heavy industry firms in Korea. Furthermore, we have attempted to quantify such effects by employing long short-term memory (LSTM), a popular neural networks model that is well-suited to deal with sequential data. Our major contribution is that we have succeeded in empirically validating the intuitive argument and also predicting the future trend with rigorous data mining techniques. With some improvements, our results are expected to be highly relevant to designing regulations regarding heavy industry in Korea.