From the consumption point of view, epidemic prevention and control drives the pharmaceutical industry and non-contact industry market surge. China's printing industry, furniture and other manufacturing industries, textile and leather manufacturing industries, and automobile manufacturing industries have greater trade dependence and are therefore more vulnerable to the global chain of industries brought about by the epidemic. According to Zhen and Liwei ( 2), the current epidemic will have a serious impact on the Chinese manufacturing industry as a whole. Yiwen and Xiaomei ( 1) conducted a quantitative study based on historical data and found that the SARS epidemic significantly inhibited the exports of Chinese enterprises and the impact of the epidemic on exports would not recover in the short term, and there was also a certain negative impact in the long term. In terms of exports, the epidemic had a greater impact on outward-oriented industries. These industries are generally characterized by high labor and capital costs. From the production point of view, the impact of the epidemic on labor-intensive industries such as textiles, garments, construction materials, toys, leather, and furniture manufacturing is greater. Therefore, under the new situation, it is expected that the impact of the epidemic on industry will be greater than that of SARS in 2003, and the impact on the restructuring and layout of domestic economy in China, Japan, and South Korea will be more profound. This epidemic has a long incubation period, a high transmission rate, and strict control over the gathering and movement of people. In October 2020, the WTO issued a newly revised forecast in light of the changing situation, projecting that global merchandise trade would fall by 9.2%. In April 2020, the World Trade Organization (WTO) predicted that under an optimistic scenario, global trade would shrink by 12.9% in 2020, while a pessimistic scenario predicted 32%. The global economy has suffered a severe shock since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results show that domestic epidemics in China, Japan, and South Korea have a non-significant (statistically significant) effect on imports, but are negatively correlated with exports in Japan epidemics in major trading partners are negatively correlated with imports in Japan and positively correlated with exports in China and South Korea and government intervention is positively correlated with imports in China and positively correlated with exports in China, Japan, and South Korea.

In addition, the three countries, China, Japan, and South Korea, are also estimated separately in consideration of the cross-country disparity. In the models, industrial production, trade openness, government response (including monetary and fiscal intervention), and the pandemic impact of major trade partners are controlled. In this paper, time-series and cross-country data spanning from January 2020 to December 2020 are adopted to empirically investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on exports and imports in China, Japan, and South Korea. 2Department of Economics, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing, China.1Department of Asian Languages, Zhejiang Yuexiu University, Shaoxing, China.

Panpan Wei 1 *, Cheng Jin 2 and Chen Xu 1

Trade import and export