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We analyze the impact of market structure on the trade performance of South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. South Korea has many large, vertically-integrated business groups known as 'chaebol', whereas business groups in Taiwan are smaller and more specialized in the production of intermediate inputs. We test the hypotheses that a greater presence of business groups leads to less product variety but higher product quality, using data on exports from these countries to the United States. We find that Taiwan tends to export a greater variety of products to the US than Korea, and this holds particularly for final goods. In addition, Taiwan exports higher-quality intermediate inputs, whereas Korea exports higher-quality final goods. A comparison with Japan is also presented, which has greater product variety in its sales to the US than either Taiwan or Korea, due to its larger size. Keywords: Product variety; Business group; South Korea; Taiwan; Japan

Transport advantage, assembly hub under global value chains, technology advantage, and home-market effect are the four main factors contributing to the emergence of trade hubs in East Asia. Using a region-specific trade "hub-ness" measure, we examine the evolution of trade hubs in the East Asia. A China-Japan twin-hub pattern was found in the 1990s, but the twin hub began to divide in the beginning of the 21st century because of a rising China and declining Japan. We also show that ASEAN as an integrated region may lead to the emergence of another trade hub in East Asia, because of the enlarged ASEAN home-market-size effect, for the highly fragmented automatic data processing industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]