Demand Elasticities In International Trade Are They Really Low

December 1996 For the first time in the economics literature, Panagariya, Shah, and Mishra obtain import demand elasticities for a small country (Bangladesh) that are very large. The elasticities are based on parameters of a utility function that are systematically of the correct sign and statistically significant. Using highly disaggregated data, both own-price and cross-price elasticities are estimated. Most economists are comfortable with the assumption that import demand elasticities facing small countries such as Austria, Belgium, and Denmark are approximately infinite. Yet the actual estimates of import demand elasticities for these and other countries are disturbingly low. Typical estimates range from 1-2, and in rare cases rise to 3. Such estimates seriously undermine the case for unilateral liberalization since they suggest considerable market power on the part of even small economies. They also raise doubts about the ability of exports to serve as an engine of growth. With import demand elasticities lying between 1 and 3, a 20 percent annual expansion in exports would, for example, lead to a substantial deterioration in the terms of trade. Panagariya, Shah, and Mishra analyze the U.S. demand for imports from Bangladesh for the products restricted under the Multifiber Arrangement. Because Bangladesh is only a small supplier of these products and close substitutes are available from many Asian and Latin American countries, they expected the elasticity of demand for Bangladeshi imports to be high. Their estimates of own-price elasticity are consistently high, exceeding 65 in all cases. This finding accords with trade theorists' prejudice that small countries can essentially behave as price takers but conflicts with the view in the empirical literature that demand elasticities rarely exceed 3 and are generally between 1 and 2. The authors' analysis differs from the existing literature in three ways. First, contrary to the general practice of postulating an ad hoc equation that violates trade theory, they derive a set of estimation equations from an explicit, utility-maximization model. They estimate these equations as a system and use the estimated parameters of the utility function to obtain the Marshallian own-price and cross-price elasticities as well as the income elasticity of demand. Second, they take explicit account of U.S. imports from competitors of Bangladesh. Rather than proxy competitors' prices by the prices prevailing in the export market, they rely directly on competitors' prices. Finally, they use highly disaggregated data that make the unit value of exports a far better proxy for price than is the case with the aggregate export data that are commonly used in this literature. This paper is a product of the Country Operations Division, Country Department I, South Asia. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under research project Export Competitiveness and the Real Exchange Rate (RPO 679-59).

For the first time in the ...

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