Re-comparison Of Trade Competitive Advantages Of China, Japan And South Korea

With the accelerated establishment of China Japan and South Korea Free Trade Zoo, China Japan and South Korea as the important economic entities of Asia have an increasingly close relationship in economy and trade. The analysis of the trade relationship among China Japan and South Korea is being concerned.With the arrival of low-carbon concept, more and more people realize that the emission of greenhouse gases will cause serious damage to the environment .Many countries in the world are going to develop low-carbon economy and set carbon emission reduction targets to reduce the environmental stress caused by greenhouse gas emission. The carbon emission of trade goods are increasingly concerned, which provides a new perspective to review the competitive advantage of trade goods. While the trade scale is expending, carbon emissions of trade goods should not be ignored. What we seek is not only the volume of trade but also low-carbon trade products. In such a context, the estimation of carbon contained in trade goods to analyze the trade competitive advantages of China Japan and South Korea will give a support to develop trade among China Japan and South Korea. It also makes for china to realize and increase trade competitiveness when trading with Japan and South Korea. That's the meaning and purpose of the analysis of this paper. Firstly, comparative advantage theories are reviewed and summarized in this paper and then the current trade situation of China Japan and South Korea are analyzed. Next, we use a series of competitive indexes to compare the competitive advantages of China Japan and South Korea. It shows that generally speaking chineseprimary products and labor-intensive products have more competitive advantages. But in some labor-intensive goods, the comparative advantage of chinese products is shrinking while the comparative advantages of japanese products and korean products are increasing. Japan and South Korea have more competitive advantages in capital-intensive products. But the advantages are decreasing. By contrast, the competition of chinese products is bettering. Even some capital-intensive products are of strong competition. Competitive gap existed between Japan (South Korea) and china continues to be narrowed. On such basis, we take iron and Steel Industry for example to estimate the amount of carbon emissions of major steel products of China Japan and South Korea. We find that through trade China exports a large mount of energy to Japan and South Korea and a lot of carbon emissions transfer to china in the form of iron and steel trade every year , which causes huge energy and environmental burden to china. For those chinese products which have increasing advantages in Japan and South Korea's markets, such competitive advantage will be greatly reduced if we take the costs of energy and carbon emissions into consideration and add the costs into the price of products. The narrowed competitive gap between china and Japan (South Korea) will be enlarged again. And then we use SWOT method to make a conditional analysis about china enhancing trade competitiveness in Japan or South Korea market under low-carbon development situation. At the end of paper, some recommendations about China how to improve the competitive advantage when trading with Japan and South Korea are putted forward. The recommendations include: establishing low-carbon outlook on development and trade; bettering the trade structure; developing green trade and enhancing enterprises'ability of technological innovation etc.