One cannot exaggerate the importance of estimating how international trade responds to changes in income and prices. But there is a tension between whether one should use models that fit the data but that contradict certain aspects of the underlying theory or models that fit the theory but contradict certain aspects of the data. The essays in Estimating Trade Elasticities book offer one practical approach to deal with this tension. The analysis starts with the practical implications of optimising behaviour for estimation and it follows with a re-examination of the puzzling income elasticity for US imports that three decades of studies have not resolved. The analysis then turns to the study of the role of income and prices in determining the expansion in Asian trade, a study largely neglected in fifty years of research. With the new estimates of trade elasticities, the book examines how they assist in restoring the consistency between elasticity estimates and the world trade identity.
The material in Estimating Trade Elasticities will be of interest to economists working in predicting the evolution of international trade and its domestic repercussions. Practitioners in the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the OECD, and Central Banks with a keen interest in international developments will benefit from the analysis in this book.

Lawrence Klein, University of Pennsylvania Jaime Marquez, Federal Reserve BoarrI* All examination of the economics literature over the last twenty years reveals a marked tendency towards polarisation. On the one hand, there has been a propensity to develop theoretical models which have little connection with either empirical verification or problems requiring immediate attention. On the other iland, empirical analyses are generally typified by testing for its own sake, with limited examination of the implications of the results. As a result, the number of papers confronting theory with facts towards the solution of economic problems has been on the decline for years. To fill this growing gap in the literature, we have invited a number of authors to write papers using both theoretical and empirical techniques to address current issues of interest to the profession at large: the US trade deficit and the global implications of policies that attempt to reduce it, the international ramifications of the debt crisis, the international oil market and its implications for the US oil industry, and the development of new econometric techniques. In addressing these issues, each author has approached the subject matter from an eclectic standpoint - that is, avoiding strict adherence to a given doctrine.

One cannot exaggerate the importance of estimating how international trade responds to changes in income and prices. But there is a tension between whether one should use models that fit the data but that contradict certain aspects of the underlying theory or models that fit the theory but contradict certain aspects of the data. The essays in Estimating Trade Elasticities book offer one practical approach to deal with this tension. The analysis starts with the practical implications of optimising behaviour for estimation and it follows with a re-examination of the puzzling income elasticity for US imports that three decades of studies have not resolved. The analysis then turns to the study of the role of income and prices in determining the expansion in Asian trade, a study largely neglected in fifty years of research. With the new estimates of trade elasticities, the book examines how they assist in restoring the consistency between elasticity estimates and the world trade identity.
The material in Estimating Trade Elasticities will be of interest to economists working in predicting the evolution of international trade and its domestic repercussions. Practitioners in the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the OECD, and Central Banks with a keen interest in international developments will benefit from the analysis in this book.