Another Empirical Look at the Theory of Overlapping Demands - Un Altro Sguardo Empirico alla Teoria delle Overlapping Demands

Linder’s theory of overlapping demands suggests that international trade in manufactured goods will be stronger between countries with similar per capita income levels. In this paper, we test the Linder hypothesis for five East Asian countries using panel data for five years. In addition to including bilateral trade data for these countries, we include their bilateral trade data with their other major trading partners. A modified gravity model is developed for this purpose. The model is first estimated for each year in the sample. In addition, a panel data set is constructed and estimated using a fixed-effects estimator. The overall results of our estimations are quite robust and do not provide support for Linder’s hypothesis