A research on foreign trade between Turkey and Saudi Arabia and the transport modes used

The economic growth of Turkey and Saudi Arabia started in the early 2000s. As their growth increased, both countries sought to increase their trade relations with other countries to sustain this growth. Thus, trade relations between the two countries have reached an advanced stage by increasing compared to previous years. Given the scarcity of academic research focusing on foreign trade between the two countries, this thesis aims to be one of the first studies to address this issue in detail. Therefore, this study, which is based on the time period between 2013 and 2023, includes three main axes to complement the lack of previous studies. The first main axis is the analysis of the historical course of trade data between the two countries. The second one is the analysis of the modes of transport used in the transportation of goods between the two countries and the associated kilogram prices. The third main axis is to present a future vision about the foreign trade of the two countries by using forecasting models which are Multilayer Perceptron, Holt winnters, SMOreg and Gaussian processes. To achieve these three axes, the thesis was based on data collected from TÜİK website. These data are 97 chapters exported from Turkey to Saudi Arabia and their FOB/USD values. The 93 chapters imported from Saudi Arabia to Turkey and their FOB/USD values. The 11 modes of transportation used to transport goods between the two countries and the kilograms of goods transported by each mode. These data were analyzed using Pareto analysis before being used. For both exports and imports, the chapters that account for 80% of trade were selected. In addition, the prices of these chapters were divided by kilograms to obtain the average price per kilogram for each chapter. The dataset on which the estimates are based is divided into two parts, one is from January 2013 to October 2023,while the other is from March 2020 to October 2023. When analyzing the progress of chapter values, the average is calculated for the period 2013-2019, as this is the period before the values started to be affected by Covid-19. The results of the thesis are summarized in this paragraph. Despite all the trade developments between Turkey and Saudi Arabia, exports have been on a downward trend. Looking at the main exported chapters, it is seen that 7 of them show a low trend, 7 show a high trend and 8 show a variable trend. Regarding the average price per kilogram of exports, 11 chapters showed a decline, 10 chapters showed an increase and 1 chapter remained unchanged. The largest decrease in average price per kilogram was 84% and the smallest decrease was 4%, while the largest increase was 38% and the smallest increase was 3%. As for imports, the two main import chapters show a fluctuating trend. Looking at the average price per kilogram for imports, the two main import chapters show a decrease of 39% and 12%, respectively.