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International trade involves the movement of goods across borders, while immigration pertains to the movement of people across national boundaries. These two phenomena are strongly correlated. To some extent, the similarity between barriers to trade and migration explains this correlation, with distance being a crucial factor in both trade and migration. Geographically closer countries tend to engage in both trade and migration because of closer cultural connections. Immigration is itself also an important determinant of trade flows. Migrant networks play a vital role in reducing trade barriers by improving information sharing and facilitating business connections. This, in turn, leads to an increase in both exports and imports between countries. As trade increasingly relies on efficient firm and supplier matching, particularly within global supply chains, the influence of migrant networks becomes more significant. Finally, immigration also drives demand for goods and services from migrants’ home countries. Migrants often maintain strong ties to their home countries and prefer consuming products and services from those regions. This preference fosters increased bilateral trade flows between the home country and the country of immigration. In summary, international trade and immigration are closely linked, and understanding the interplay between international trade and immigration is crucial for comprehending the dynamics of the global economy.

The gravity model of international trade states that the volume of trade between two countries is proportional to their economic mass and a measure of their relative trade frictions. Perhaps because of its intuitive appeal, the gravity model has been the workhorse model of international trade for more than 50 years. While the initial empirical work using the gravity model lacked sound theoretical underpinnings, the theoretical developments have highlighted how a gravity-like specification can be derived from many models with varying assumptions about preferences, technology, and market structure. Along the strengthening of the theoretical roots of the gravity model, the way in which it is estimated has also evolved significantly since the start of the new millennium. Depending on the exact characteristics of regression, different estimation methods should be used to estimate the gravity model.

For research attempting to investigate why economic activities are distributed unevenly across geographic space, new economic geography (NEG) provides a general equilibrium-based and microfounded approach to modeling a spatial economy characterized by a large variety of economic agglomerations. NEG emphasizes how agglomeration (centripetal) and dispersion (centrifugal) forces interact to generate observed spatial configurations and uneven distributions of economic activity. However, numerous economic geographers prefer to refer to the term new economic geographies as vigorous and diversified academic outputs that are inspired by the institutional-cultural turn of economic geography. Accordingly, the term geographical economics has been suggested as an alternative to NEG. Approaches for modeling a spatial economy through the use of a general equilibrium framework have not only rendered existing concepts amenable to empirical scrutiny and policy analysis but also drawn economic geography and location theories from the periphery to the center of mainstream economic theory. Reduced-form empirical studies have attempted to test certain implications of NEG. However, due to NEG’s simplified geographic settings, the developed NEG models cannot be easily applied to observed data. The recent development of quantitative spatial models based on the mechanisms formalized by previous NEG theories has been a breakthrough in building an empirically relevant framework for implementing counterfactual policy exercises. If quantitative spatial models can connect with observed data in an empirically meaningful manner, they can enable the decomposition of key theoretical mechanisms and afford specificity in the evaluation of the general equilibrium effects of policy interventions in particular settings. Several decades since its proposal, NEG has been criticized for its parsimonious assumptions about the economy across space and time. Therefore, existing challenges still require theoretical and quantitative models on new microfoundations pertaining to the interactions between economic agents across geographical space and the relationship between geography and economic development.