This paper is purposed to build up the foreign trade statistics
DB(Data-base) of Korea from 1877 to 1963 and estimate the long-term trend
of foreign trade. Major work for this was to utilize new sources, to combine
various trade statistics which were differently formatted according to
producers, and to assign SITC(Standard International Trade Classification)
code to each item. This elaboration allowed us to link our data with UN
Comtrade DB, which result in a consistent series from 1877 to 2006. We also
computed the chained Fischer unit price index, the quantity index of trade and
the terms of trade, which were linked up with indices exhibited by the
BOK(Bank of Korea). We divided the 130-year period since the opening of
the port into four, which are the open-port period, the colonial period, from
the liberation to the early 1960s and after the mid-1960s, showed how the
composition of trade and the various indices changed over time and tried to
explain their differences in each period. The high growth of trade was
characterizing all period, except the third period when the openness was
shrinking. Even though the net barter terms of trade was sometimes improved
or deteriorated, the income terms of trade was improved constantly all the
time due to the fast increasing quantity of export.