This paper empirically examines the trade patterns of the Korean primary agricultural products to assess how much the Korean trade policy restricts the imports of this product category. We use yearly trade data from 1976 to 2016 to obtain the revealed symmetric comparative advantage and the trade balance. The difference between the two indicators can reveal the policy interference tendency. To our surprise, the results show that Korean policy contrarily facilitates the imports of primary agricultural products during the period. That may be an evidence of the adoption of virtual land strategy, which prompts Korea to import more agricultural products than the comparative advantage predicts.

This study tests the feasibility of dynamic comparative advantage theory in Japan. Specifically, we use annual trade data of primary agricultural products of 1976-2015 to obtain the government interference in imports. We find that the Japanese net export ratios in this category are significantly lower than the degree that the actual comparative advantages determine. We conclude that Japan does not try to improve its comparative advantages by imposing restrictive trade policies on the imports. In other words, the theory of dynamic comparative advantages does not hold in Japan, at least for the Japanese imports of the primary agricultural products.

This study analyzes the Chinese trade patterns in low-technology manufactures for the period of 1987-2017. We employ H-index, or the difference between net export capability and symmetric revealed comparative advantage, to assess the trade policies in exports and imports. The results reveal that China has comparative advantage in the exports, and has had comparative disadvantage in the imports before 2006. We document that China has attempted to protect its low-technology industries by both export facilitation and import restriction.

Japan's savings rate was higher than other countries in the world in the past. However, since 1990s Japan's saving rate has undergone significant changes, which had a downward trend. In order to explain these phenomena, we analyze the determinants of Japan's saving rate, and conclude that income factors, demographic factors and social security system factors have some bad impacts on the saving rate on the basis of the saving theory and analysis of the latest economic data. The changes in Japan's saving rate not only affected its own economies, but also affected the world economy.

Using annual trade data during the period of 1976-2016, this study conducted co-integration analysis of the Korean trade pattern in the imports of agricultural manufactures. We find that Korea has comparative disadvantage and trade deficits in the imports of agricultural manufactures. Granger causality tests indicates that in short-run, there is no Granger causality between the improvements in trade balance and comparative advantages in the Korean imports of agricultural manufactures; in the long-run, the efforts adversely hurt the comparative advantages.