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This study aims to assess the trade potential of Pakistan in terms of destinations and products against 101 potential trading partners while applying the gravity model and the trade potential index. The findings indicate that Pakistan’s trade/export potential is maximum with the countries which are not its traditional trading partners. On the other hand, “manufactured goods”, “misc manufactured articles” and “food groups” are the products where maximum trade/export potential exists. Results indicate that Pakistan should not only adopt proactive measures to tap non-traditional partners but it is equally important to strengthen the level of trade with its traditional trading partners.

Germany and China have substantially enhanced their economic ties over the last decade. Germany is China’s biggest trading partners in EU while China is Germany’s second largest trading partner outside Europe in term of total turnover. This study attempts to assess trade potential between Germany and China using an augmented gravity model. It detects a gap between the actual Germany–China bilateral trade and the level that is predicted by their export potentials. It is reasonable to expect the existence of de facto trade preferential between the two countries. Because of the high complementarity of their economic structures, Germany and China will benefit from closer economic ties and increase their competition in global market. Moreover, the enhanced bilateral relationship tends to help both of them exploit the growing economic power to increase their individual influence in regional governance.

In the past ten years, emerging countries have considerably increased their production of cars. Although their share in world exports is still below 10%, these countries are now ready to conquer international markets, since they can produce on a large scale at very low production costs compared with the Northern standards. Given the lack of literature on this topic, the main contribution of this paper is to investigate the export potential of emerging countries in the automotive industry. Based on new developments in the gravity equation, an original world trade model is applied to the car industry. The export potentials are calculated from the residuals of the model with the out-sample technique. The main results show that several large emerging countries enjoy a very significant export potential. These are mainly China, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Iran, Thailand as well as Indonesia. The growing influence of these countries has strong implications for the Triad. Indeed, Japan, Germany and small European countries have already surpassed their export potential. In fact, only North American countries still exhibit a significant export potential, because their export level is currently low in comparison to what it should be given their huge economic size.