Empirical Analysis Of Japan's Import Trade Policy And Its Perfrmance

Export trade plays a very important role in the economic development of a country because exports mean obtaining foreign exchange income and expanding international markets,but people will often ignore the impact of import trade.In fact,the dispute between free trade and trade protection complicates the import problem,because it involves the contradiction between consumers and producers,individual interests and national welfare.Free trade will bring economic benefits to the world,but it will also result in the redistribution of economic interests between different countries and different interest groups.Thus far,the debate over free trade and trade protectionism continues.Japan,as a developed country,started to implement its strategic trade policy since the mid-1970 s and did not hesitate to promote export trade at the expense of reducing its profit margins over a longer period.In addition,trade barriers were set up to limit imports and protect the domestic market as much as possible.However,Japan's use of restricted imports for trade protection also needs to be determined by empirical analysis.By comparing the comparative advantage of a country's trade products with its net export capacity,it is possible to deduce the types of policy interventions that a government exerts on its trade.If the comparative advantage of a country's product is higher than that of its net export,a country tends to implement a trade policy that restricts or encourages imports.If a country's comparative advantage is lower than its net export capacity,a country tends to Implement policies to encourage exports or restrict imports.This paper use SITC rev.2 three digits products trade data from 1976 to 2016,the 236 kinds of products to the aggregation of 11 categories,build the import intervention index,research and analysis of the current situation of Japanese products import trade patterns and evolution as well as the overall import trade trade pattern evolution characteristics of deviation tendency and policy orientation.According to the results of most products in Japan there is a net import trade export capacity below the comparative advantages of trade pattern negative deviation tendency,that Japan is not blindly through restrictions on imports to protect domestic industry,but on some products to encourage imports to meet domestic demand.The Plaza Accord of 1985 and the Maekawa Report of 1986 were seen as turning points in Japan's import trade,at which point there was the least deviation.Negative deviation suggests that Japan's over-reliance on imports on certain products may have an impact on Japan's future economic development.It also established the VAR model including the import trade policy intervention index and the imported symmetrical display comparative advantage index,and found that there was no Granger causality in any direction between the two.A further generalized impulse response function analysis shows that a higher degree of import restrictions would,on the contrary,reduce the comparative advantage of imports.This paper argues that during most of the sample period,Japan's import trade policies tended to favor import promotion rather than import restrictions,and such trade policy had little effect on the enhancement of comparative advantage.