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East Asian Economic Review Vol. 8, No. 2, 2004. pp. 319-355.

DOI https://dx.doi.org/10.11644/KIEP.JEAI.2004.8.2.132

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Measuring Gravity in International Trade Flows

Author

E. Young Song

Sogang University

eysong@sogang.ac.kr
Creative Commons Attribution License

EAER is an open access journal distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. One is to clarify the concept of gravity in international trade flows. The other is to measure the strength of gravity in international trade flows in a way that is consistent with a well-defined concept of gravity. This paper shows that the widely accepted belief that specialization is the source of gravity is not well grounded on theory. We propose to define gravity in international trade as the force that makes the market shares of an exporting country constant in all importing countries, regardless of their sizes. In a stochastic context, we should interpret it as implying that the strength of gravity increases i) as the correlation between market shares and market sizes gets weaker and ii) as the variance of market shares gets smaller. We estimate an empirical gravity equation thoroughly based on this definition of gravity. We find that a strong degree of gravity exists in most bilateral trade, regardless of income levels of countries, and in trade of most manThe purpose of this paper is two-fold. One is to clarify the concept of gravity in international trade flows. The other is to measure the strength of gravity in international trade flows in a way that is consistent with a well-defined concept of gravity. This paper shows that the widely accepted belief that specialization is the source of gravity is not well grounded on theory. We propose to define gravity in international trade as the force that makes the market shares of an exporting country constant in all importing countries, regardless of their sizes. In a stochastic context, we should interpret it as implying that the strength of gravity increases i) as the correlation between market shares and market sizes gets weaker and ii) as the variance of market shares gets smaller. We estimate an empirical gravity equation thoroughly based on this definition of gravity. We find that a strong degree of gravity exists in most bilateral trade, regardless of income levels of countries, and in trade of most manufactured goods, regardless of the degree of product differentiation.

JEL classification: C5, F1, F4

Keywords

Trade, Gravity Equation, Specialization

Language

Korean

References

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