Production of sophisticated goods and its effects on export: The case of Turkey

It has become a necessity for countries that want to find a place in international markets to use technology in the products they produce together with technological developments. With the export-based growth model it has adopted since the early 1980s, Turkey has turned to technological good production, and despite the local and global crises of 1994, 2001 and 2008, it has succeeded in increasing the production of technology-based products in its exports. The extent to which technology is used in the goods produced by the countries, how much of the production is based on knowledge, and technology is measured by the economic complexity index. This index is important in terms of revealing the export capacity of countries, the possibility of preferring export products and the ability of countries to produce sophisticated products. In this context, sophisticated good production, which is the main determinant of the economic complexity index, is directly related to the fact that countries are at the top of the economic complexity index. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of sophisticated products, called high-tech products, in which information and technology are used intensively in production, on Turkey's exports and to try to determine the most appropriate export policies in this direction. For this reason, the effect of economic complexity, which is accepted as an indicator of the ability to produce sophisticated products, on Turkey's product export has been discussed and researched for the period between 1982 and 2019.In the study, first of all, the technological developments since the industrial revolution, the theoretical approaches developed within the framework of international trade, the emergence of the economic complexity index and the effect of sophisticated good production on Turkey's exports were discussed theoretically, and then empirical research was carried out. In this research, ARDL bounds test was used and it was concluded that the results obtained are compatible with the theory and that sophisticated good production has an increasing effect on Turkey's exports. The fact that Turkey has experienced many local and global crises after 1980 and that it has adopted an export-led growth model in these periods reveals the necessity for Turkey to rise to higher ranks in the economic complexity index. As the findings obtained, the basis of sophisticated good production is technological good production, the condition of being in the first place in the economic complexity index is to use more technology in production.