I discovered an issue when I deleted a field from an entity. After deleting it from our development IDE environment, I exported the entity into an xml file so that I could import it into our test IDE environment. When I imported it into this environment, the field is still present.

I examined the xml file and the field isn't there so I would expect that when I import it into another environment, the field would not appear.

Maybe importing does a "merge" rather than a "replace"? I would expect the latter.

Thank you for your help.

An import will only do an insert/update... It does not delete data.

You should delete all the entity to be imported data, before doing an import.