A limiting feature of several theoretically superior "shrinkage" estimators for the linear regression model lies in the fact that there must be a certain degree of orthogonality in regressors in order for them to dominate the ordinary least squares estimator. In this paper we apply variants of pre-test and Stein estimators to data on international trade, and discuss their merits in light of the limitations imposed by the non-orthogonality of these and other sets of economic data.