Factors affecting Turkey's exports in line of competitiveness

Developments in international trade have caused countries to face intense competition in export markets. The inadequacy of the cost/price-based competition approach of traditional trade theories in explaining today's international trade relations requires consideration of factors other than cost/price advantage in order to gain competitiveness. In this study, in order to determine Turkey's competitiveness in exports, the disclosed comparative advantage method created by Balassa, one of the measurement methods using post-trade data, as well as the competitive power measurement methods developed by Vollrath, its new derivatives, were used by eliminating the deficiencies of the disclosed comparative advantages method. It has been tried to determine the macroeconomic factors that are thought to affect the demand of export goods determined in line with the data obtained from competitiveness measurements. For this purpose, the export demand function was tried to be estimated with the explanatory variables of human capital, real exchange rate, foreign income level, relative export price and gross fixed capital investment within the scope of two models with two goods groups determined in line with the data obtained from competitiveness measurements as dependent variables. ARDL bounds test and Toda-Yamamoto causality analyzes were conducted to determine the relationships between export and explanatory variables in the period covering 2001-2019. As a result of the study, it has been seen that the most important factor in terms of long-term and causality relationship for the two export groups is human capital. In addition, it was found that the real exchange rate also affected the two export groups in the long run, and it was concluded that the effects of the explanatory variables of foreign income level, gross fixed capital investment and relative export price and the causality relations differ in terms of the two goods groups.