Analysis of the relationship between R&D expenditures economic growth and foreign trade: The Case of Turkey

The aim of this study is to identify the causal relationships between R&D expenditures, economic growth and foreign trade in Turkiye. For this purpose, we employ data covering the period 1996-2021 and identify inductive causal inference schemes between these variables through Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) analysis. The obtained DAG patterns show that economic growth directly affects R&D expenditures and these expenditures have a direct impact on the volume of foreign trade. The findings of the study also reveal that domestic fixed capital investments are a direct cause of R&D expenditures.