Some New Insights into the Effects of the EU-South Korea Free Trade Area: The Role of Non Tariff Barriers

The present study proposes an updated and extended quantitative assessment of the EU-South Korea FTA, through a new version of MIRAGE CGE model. Several distinctive contributions are offered. Firstly, the quantitative assessment takes into account non-tariff barriers (NTBs) as well as tariffs. Second, it considers trade liberalization of goods, services as well as FDI (establishment). A third contribution is that simulations of policy changes are closely aligned with the actual agreement for each industry and service category. Finally, this article relies on recent techniques for calculating the tariff equivalents of NTBs following Kee et al. (2009). The main findings show that the EU may increase trade performance in several industries (chemicals, machinery, other manufactured and food products) as well as in specific services to a lesser extent (business, insurance and transport services ). On the other hand, Korea takes advantage of the agreement for specific manufactured products (textiles, leather/clothing, cars and other transport equipment).