Intra-Industry Trade in the Visegrad Countries: Does the Linder Hypothesis Hold?

In 1961, Staffan Linder attacked mainstream trade economics by diverging from the generally accepted factor endowments theory and focusing on alternative explanations of why countries trade with each other. He was among the first economists to recognise the growing importance of intra-industry trade and presented his hypothesis that the more similar the per capita income levels of countries, the more they tend to trade with each other. This observation has since become one of the main pillars of modern trade theory. The present paper assesses the empirical validity of the Linder hypothesis in the Visegrad countries. Using a variant of the gravity model, it finds that when controlling for other factors, the Visegrad countries tend to trade more with countries with similar per capita income levels than with significantly richer or poorer countries. This observation is consistent with the Linder hypothesis. OLS regressions, Tobit regressions, and robustness checks all support the hypothesis.