Price relationship among domestic and imported beef products in South Korea

This study examines a price relationship among domestic South Korean (hereafter, Korea) premium beef, “Hanwoo,” non-premium beef, “Yukwoo,” and imported beef from the USA and Australia. In our study, we utilize monthly data from Korea Institute for Animal Products Quality Evaluation and the Global Trade Atlas from the period between January 2009 and December 2016. We model a directed acyclic graph and employ the Granger causality test and variance decomposition methods. The results show that based on the price relationship, the imported beef products compete with Yukwoo, and not with Hanwoo. Our findings imply that Korean consumers consider Hanwoo to be different from imported beef.