The US Trade Deficit：A Disaggregated Perspective

2005.09 45页　　英文 1.19M SEPTEMBER 2005

Catherine L. Mann and Katharina Plück

By early 2005, US net trade had been in deficit for more than 25 years and was on a trajectory for more than $700 billion for the year. In dollar terms, this was the largest deficit of any country ever; as a share of GDP, it was much larger than ever experienced by a large industrial country. Pundits, policymakers, financiers, and researchers want to know how the trade deficit got so large. They are even more interested in its future path. Empirical modeling of the determinants of trade flows using the “elasticities” approach has a very long history in international economics and is used both to explain the past and to project the future. Key
ingredients of this model are the elasticity of demand for exports and imports with respect to economic activity, the elasticity of exports and imports with respect to relative prices, and the influence of other factors, including global supply and increased variety