International trade in cultural goods

Abstract

This dissertation aims to study the various aspects of the international trade in cultural goods. Since systematically measuring trade statistics of cultural goods has been extremely difficult, the study on this field has been, if any, rare compared to that on manufactured goods. However, notwithstanding the limited extent, some innovative ways to measure the scale of trade in cultural goods can be found. The first research article focuses on the rise of the Korean wave and its implications utilizing the data of Korean export of broadcasting contents to Asian countries. The result suggests that, in addition to cultural proximity, the relative economic development of the export country and the market size of the import country are important determinants of cultural trade. The second empirical analysis identifies the relation between the Korean wave and Korean cosmetics export by using Google trends query index with keyword ‘Korean drama’ as a proxy variable for cultural trade. The results reveal that the Korean wave indeed leads to the cosmetics export to culturally and geographically close ASEAN countries but show weak relation with the cosmetics export to the worldwide countries in general. Whereas previous two articles deal with trade in cultural goods in the context of the ‘Korean Wave’, the third article extends the scope to the tourism industry. The main concern of the final article is to find out determinants of Korean outbound tourism utilizing a gravity model. Tourism flows respond strongly to the price difference between Korea and destination countries and the presence of direct flights shows a positive sign with statistical significance. When destination countries are divided into two groups, OECD and others, Korean tourists are less price-sensitive to trips to OECD countries than they are to other countries.