Abstract:
This research, entitled Risk and Sustainability of Trade Dependent Economy, is aimed at examining the impact of the degree of trade openness (TO) on the GDP growth. The degree of trade openness is defined as the ratio of export plus import to GDP. The researcher attempts to find whether the impact of trade openness on GDP growth is positive or negative, or none at all. The statistical evidence showed that, for many Eastern Asian countries, the trade openness had contributed to high GDP growth rate during the 1990 decade. However, from the years 2000s onward, these countries had experienced the slowdown in GDP growth, despite the continuing expansion of international trade.
Based on such evidence, the researcher conjectures that the trade openness might have an impact on GDP growth in nonlinear manner. In particular, it is hypothesized in this research that, the trade openness will stimulate GDP growth of the country at the beginning periods due to the specialization in production and technology transfer facilitated by trade. But as the trade openness continues to expand, the point will be reached, beyond which the trade openness will result in the slowdown of GDP growth rate. This can be explained by microeconomic theory which explains that
the marginal return of input will be diminishing as the scale of production expands beyond a certain optimal point.
To test the hypothesis of nonlinear impact of trade openness on GDP growth, the researcher employs the Auto-Regressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) model to construct the longrun equilibrium relationship and short-run adjustment among macro-variables involved, namely, GDP Growth, Investment, Bank Credit, Broad Money, and Trade Openness. The researcher selects Thailand as a case study. The annual data for the estimation of the ARDL model were collected mostly from World Banks database, covering the period 1970-2019.
The estimation results come out in support of the hypothesis, that is, the trade openness contributes positively to GDP growth at the beginning of trade openness. However, at a certain point in time, the GDP growth starts to decline, despite the continuing trade expansion. This phenomenon can be explained as follow. At the beginning of trade, the country can benefit extensively from technology transfer and specialization brought along with trade. But later on, as trade continues to expand without limit, the point will be reached when the return from resource utilization will decline as the limited resource input is stretched beyond its capacity. This will result in the overall GDP to grow at a declining rate. This result is in line with microeconomic principle of diminishing return of input in the production process.
The estimation of nonlinear impact of trade openness on GDP growth also enables us to compute the optimal degree of openness in which the maximum GDP growth for the economy can attain. Our calculation results show that the optimal degree of openness is 91.57%, and the associated maximum GDP growth is 9.74%.
In term of the sustainability of the economic system, the result from the estimation of short-run Error Correction equation indicates that the system is able to adjust, with oscillation, back to its long-run equilibrium at the rate of 59% of the size of disequilibrium in subsequent periods.
The results from this research provide policy implication as follow. It is recommended that it is necessary for the policy maker to study to find the optimal level of trade openness that will yield the maximum output growth rate. If the trade openness is expanded beyond this optimal level, then the growth rate will go down unavoidably and might even turn to negative growth at some point.
It is further recommended that, to avoid growth rate slowdown, the country must change its production process into technology-intensive or transform its economic structure into service-oriented economy. Singapore and Hong Kong are good examples of service-oriented economy in that they can maintain reasonable growth rate despite having very high degree of trade openness.