Abstract:

With the beginning of the liberalization process of international trade, the world economy has experienced significant transformations. In particular, the unbalanced distribution of raw materials used in production processes over the world, the distance between the place where production is done and the resources of raw materials, the transport and transfer costs are highlighted. In this context, the maritime transport market, which reduces the transport costs to a minimum according to its alternatives, becomes of great importance and allows us to observe the current situation of the world economy and make forecasts for the future. It is one of the most important components of the world production and trade volume, the dry cargo market in the maritime transport market, especially iron, coal, grain, etc. It is the transportation of important materials. The shipping prices on this market are monitored by the Baltic Dry Goods Index (BDI) published by the Baltic Exchange in London. Therefore, in the study for measuring the volume of world trade, this index value was used as a vector variable, and as an analysis method, the Markov regime change model was used. In the model that covers quarterly data between 1985:1 - 2019:2, regime 1 shows that "the world's raw materials demand is above the average" and regime 2 shows that "the world's raw materials demand is at the average". It was successfully captured by the economic recovery model before the 2008 World Financial Crisis.