A Study on the Interrelationship of Trade, Investment and Economic Growth in Myanmar: Policy Implications from South Korea’s Economic Growth

Purpose – This paper addresses the concepts of FDI-Trade-Growth nexus in Myanmar’s economy and empirically investigates the interrelationships of trade, investment and economic growth to reveal the growth model of Myanmar’s economy. Additionally, this paper also addresses the cooperative strategies between Myanmar and South Korea through a case study related to South Korea’s economic growth. Design/methodology – Our empirical model considers the interrelationship among FDI, trade, growth, labor force and inflation in Myanmar. This study employs ARDL (Autoregressive Distributed Lag) to conduct an analysis of the FDI-Trade-Growth relationships using the time series data from 1970 to 2016 and a conducted case study of South Korea provided for practical implication on cooperative strategies between Myanmar and Korea. Findings – Export equation was chosen through the diagnostic tests. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: Export in Myanmar is positively influenced by labor force, FDI, capital formation and negatively impacted by import and instable inflation rate in the long run. In the short run, GDP and import positively influence export. The Granger causality test proves that Myanmar is an FDI/labor force-led Growth economy, where FDI and labor force are main drivers of export followed by GDP in Myanmar. The case study of South Korea provided that Korea’s tax and credit system for promoting export-led FDI industries and cooperative units for joint ventures between Korea and Myanmar in export-led FDI industries are recommended. Originality/value – No study has yet to be conducted on the interrelationships of macroeconomic factors from the perspectives of FDI-Trade-Growth Nexus in Myanmar under the assumption of labor force and inflation rate as fundamental conditions. The current study also covered a relatively longer period of time series data from 1970 to 2016. This paper also conducts a case study of South Korea’s experience in order to evaluate the findings and provide better policy implications.