Bilateral Trade Elasticities

Abstract

This paper estimates income and price elasticities for bilateral world trade. In addition to testing the properties of the error terms, the dynamic specification, and the assumption of parameter constancy, the analysis presents the first application of the Bank Spectrum estimator to bilateral trade flows for all countries. The paper finds that bilateral trade elasticities exhibit enough of a dispersion to suggest that the direction of trade is sensitive to changes in income and prices. Using the bilateral elasticities as raw data, the analysis obtains the associated multilateral estimates and finds that they are both consistent with the literature and suitable to addressing questions involving multilateral trade. But the evidence also reveals that sole reliance on multilateral elasticities conceals valuable information for both policy applications and empirical analyses of international trade. Copyright 1990 by MIT Press.

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