Abstract:

Turkey has the ecological characteristics adequate to cotton farming and thus it plays an important role in production and trade worldwide. Determining the significant factors affecting the trade of cotton, which is an important product both for exports and imports and revealing whether these factors differentiate by national and global dynamics or not is considerably important. In this study, the factors affecting cotton export of Turkey between the years of 2002 and 2017 are analysed by using gravity model and panel data method. It is determined that Turkey's cotton export has a positive relationship with gross domestic product, gross domestic product per capita values, population and EU membership of the countries to which Turkey exports cotton and a negative relationship with Linder variable. On the other hand, the variable of border neighborhood does not have a statistically significant effect on Turkey's cotton export either since the share of these countries in total cotton exports is quite low compared to EU member countries. In conclusion, factors that may increase the competitive advantage in potential markets should be taken into consideration in terms of new market opportunities as the distance of trading countries does not have any effect. Particularly, policies of USA and China which are effective in world's market are important variables for Turkey as they are for other countries. Therefore, the policies of these countries should be carefully monitored when making any regulation.

Keywords: