Bangladesh began implementing a series of trade liberalization reforms in the early 1990s in an attempt to arrest a burgeoning trade deficit, but with little effect. This may be due to trade policies based on aggregate data that ignore the individual responses of Bangladesh's main trading partners. This study estimates the bilateral price and income export and import elasticities for Bangladesh's five major trading partners. The findings indicate that the bilateral elasticity estimates not only vary in magnitude among the countries, but also differ markedly from aggregate elasticity values estimated in previous studies. This suggests that policies should he tailored to trading partners to deliver the intended outcomes.

Outstanding external debt of Sri Lanka has mounted to a staggering level of US$ 10, 000 millions in 2003. Using data from the last five decades, this paper suggests that the capacity to service external debt is becoming a difficult task in the face of deteriorating terms of trade, mounting current account deficit, depreciating local currency value, heavy dependency on imports and tightening borrowing conditions. We find that Sri Lanka should not be too complacent about its external debt situation although it has received much needed foreign debt assistance in the form of debt write offs and debt moratoriums from its creditors after the disastrous Boxing Day tsunami.