Analysis of Factors Affecting Vegetable Price Fluctuation: A Case Study of South Korea

The fluctuation of vegetable prices in recent years underscores the need to identify contributing factors and develop effective policies. In order to examine the factors affecting the fluctuation of vegetable prices, this paper uses a structural model constructed by demand, supply, import, and export functions to decompose price variance, and also performs a numerical simulation to generalize the results. We studied the Korean vegetable market, and selected cabbage, radish, dried red pepper, garlic, and onion as research objects. The results indicates that variability of domestic production is the primary factor that influences price fluctuations in the Korean vegetable market. In contrast, our analysis revealed that demand, import, and export had a limited impact on price fluctuations in the Korean vegetable market, except for dried red pepper and onion.