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U.s. Trade Patterns The Choice Of Trade

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U.S. trade patterns are an important topic of study due to America’s power and central position in the international market. This topic of US trade partners and our trading patterns with those partners has been approached from a variety of perspectives by several economists. Namely, Sattinger (1978), Srivastava and Green (1986), Summary (1989), and Pollins (1989a and 1989b). The literature draws many conclusions from American competitiveness and the political and social factors that help explain bilateral trade patterns the choice of trade partners. And while there is an abundance of literature concerning this topic there has been little done from the perspective of how America’s trade partners have developed and shifted over the last 25 years, which is what this paper will focus on achieving. International trade flows are also an important topic and have been estimated by many economists including, Tinbergen (1962), Anderson (1979), Helpman and Krugman (1985), Helpman (1987), Feenstra (2002), and Anderson and van Wincoop (2003). Each of these researchers used a variant of the gravity model to estimate trade flows which not only demonstrates the continuing empirical validity of the model but gives firm background with which to base this analysis. The basic gravity model states that the volume of trade between two countries is proportional to the size of the two economies, and various measures of trade resistance such as geographical distance between the countries,

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