태국의 FTA 무역정책: 기원, 활용도 및 함의

초록

Trade policy of Thailand, in former times, was the multilateral non-discriminatory free trade policy. But after the Asian financial crisis, Thai government switches to free trade agreement(FTA) policy that promotes bilateral FTA with other countries. Major reasons are three fold. First, they try to open the domestic market to foreign investors in order to vitalize the domestic economy. Second, they try to get access to foreign market, after the collapse of economy due to Asian financial crisis. Third, they are afraid of being lagged behind their competitor, Singapore. Nowadays, Thai's trade policy emphasizes positive attitudes toward FTAs in order to join various kinds of FTA agreement such as Thai-Australia FTA(TAFTA), Thai-Japan FTA, and AFTA, etc. Upcoming problem of Thai government is the low utilization rate of FTA, which is a widespread problem all over the world. This paper finds that Thai business firms have no incentive to utilize FTAs, since there is no substantial discrimination between MFN tariff rate and FTA tariff rate across various product lines. Furthermore, we find that SMEs have no incentive to use FTA in their business, since they are faced with a substantial adminstration cost of handling FTA to alleviate noodel bowl problem. A basic problem related with low utilization is the information problem of firms. Therefore, it is necessary to expose enterprises to informations of FTAs.

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