US bilateral trade equations: forecasts and structural stability

In this paper actual recent US trade values are compared with out-of-sample forecasts using a standard specification for real bilateral trade value equations. Though fairly accurate on average, there are large bilateral errors. A battery of coefficient stability tests indicates significant instability more often for imports over the forecast period and more often for exports over the latter part of the estimation period. Thus, standard bilateral trade equations appear to violate the basic regression assumption of stability and may be of little use for forecasting.