What Did Turkey Do in terms of Export Competitiveness After 2000?

Abstract

Competitiveness relates to an economy's ability to produce products efficiently and effectively, enabling it to compete in domestic and global markets. It encompasses factors such as productivity, innovation, quality, cost-efficiency, and market access. Competitive economies are more likely to attract investment, create jobs, and achieve higher levels of economic development. Especially competitiveness rankings provide opportunity of benchmarking, effective policy guidance, attractive investment, global comparison and eveluation. In this respect, this study has been conducted to examine Turkey's export structure in the period 2001-2021 within the framework of Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System and to compare its competitiveness with the Revealed Symmetric Comparative Advantage Index (RSCA). The data used to calculate the RSCA values are taken from TradeMap, the database of the International Trade Centre (ITC). The comparison was made with Turkey's highest trading partners, the countries with the largest share in Turkey's export. While Turkey had RSCA in 37 products in 2001, it increased to 45 products in 2021. Similar to Podoba et al. (2021), product groups are categorised according to observable trends in RSCA values. In 2001, 5 products with RSCA decreased, and in 2021, 12 products with comparative advantage replaced them