Trade and Competitiveness Between Turkey and the EU: Time Series Evidence

The paper basically aims to clarify the level of price competitiveness of the Turkish firms towards the EU Single Market in aggregate level. Thus it naturally examines the demand for exports and imports for Turkey in relation to the EU. In order to model the trade between Turkey and the EU, we employ a time series analysis, namely cointegration method with error correction and causality mechanisms, for the period 1963-2002. The paper also deals with the possible effects of factors such as structural breaks, integration of markets, product innovation, supply, and omitted variables as regards the significance and the magnitude of the income and price elasticities. In the light of our empirical findings, some policy implications are drawn.trade, competitiveness, income and price elasticities, EU, Turkey, time series modeling, cointegration

Turkey’s Competitiveness in the EU Market: a Comparison of Different Trade Measures

The paper basically explores the competitiveness of the Turkish industries in the EU Market by employing different trade measures such as the Balassa’s Revealed Comparative Advantage Index (RCA), Vollrath’s Revealed Competitiveness Index, GrubelLloyd Index, and Brülhart B Marginal Intra-Industry Trade Index. The main drawback of the existing empirical literature is that various RCA indices are widely used to explain the competitiveness of a country. This paper however not only focuses on various RCA indices but some additional and complementary measures of competitiveness are also applied since they underline different aspects/dimensions of competitiveness. Consistency of the results of various trade measures are then compared by using the Sperman Rank Correlation and Kruskal Wallis tests. Based on the empirical results,some policy implications are drawn