The Relation between Economic Development and International Trade: A Comparative Analysis of East Asian and Southeast Asian Economies

The impressive economic development of East Asian and Southeast Asian countries, like China, Japan, South Korea, or Singapore, is often described as the ‘Asian economic miracle’. The transition from a less developed economy to an industrialised country and successful integration into the global economy within a relatively short period of time are characteristics of the economic development process. Academic research is dominated by a general agreement on the causal relationship between economic development and international trade. The research goal of this paper is to analyse the impact of the level of economic development on the degree of international trade in the economies of China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Thailand. The applied research model does not follow the traditional research mainstream but rather introduces relative shares of GDP-related industrial output and of manufactures exports by adopting national as well as international perspectives instead. Descriptive trend analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis are conducted in order to test the hypotheses. The results do not support conventional academic wisdom. A statistically reasonable causality between the level of economic development, in terms of relative industrial output, and the degree of international trade, in terms of relative industrial exports, could not be confirmed.