Analysis of the effects of international maritime transportation on Turkey's foreign trade and its competition with other transport modes

This study, which aims to estimate a Panel VAR model with labor force, foreign direct investment, total handling at the ports, inflation, current account balance and industrial production index variables between the period of 2011-2017 by monthly data uses a panel data set gathered from Turkey and two other countries which are the highest ranked countries in the Logistics Performance Index (LPI) namely Spain and Germany. In order to do conduct a Panel VAR analysis one has to check for the stationarity of the variables. The panel unit root analysis has shown that inflation, handelling, labor force and current account deficit series were stationary at the level where the industrial production index and exchange rate series were first order stationary. After checking for stationarity the Panel VAR model was estimated. Since because the autoregressive models' contain high multicollinearity among the variables; instead of interpreting the coefficients and their significance here we analyze the error terms to investigate the shocks the system might contain through impulse-response analysis and variance decomposition.