Modelling export and import demand functions: the Spanish case

During the last decades the exchange trade in Spain overseas has experienced a major boost, firstly related to European market integration and, recently, to the worldwide globalization process, whereby huge exporters (i.e. China or India) have raised to the new international scene and the development of services’ international exchange both played a key role. These changes make the analysis of the conditioning main factors for explaining the evolution of exchange trade flows in Spain by means of econometric models especially hard, since they seldom may approach the special features of the long term under consideration. The aim of this paper is showing the results obtained once traditional demand functions for imports and exports of goods and services for the Spanish economy – quarterly series from National Accounts for the period 1980-2006 – were re-estimated. Besides, within goods’ flows based on home and host’s Euro Area exports and imports, on one hand, and worldwide, on the other, are taken into consideration in order to prove whether trade flows’ determinants may vary across host markets where goods are exchanged. The estimated equations allow us identifying whether traditional determinants on trade flows abroad have suffered relevant changes and how they have contributed in explaining the evolution of the period 1980-2008.