A COMPLEMENTARITY INDEX STUDY: THE CASE OF TURKEY

This paper aims to understand the trade structure of Turkey in a scientific base. The empirical question is how much compatible Turkey’s trade is with its partners. After a literature review, we work through the indices created to gauge a market’s complementarity with another and evaluate the appropriateness of these indices by examining each and making a comparison between them. Rather than relying upon one of them -of each has its own pros and cons-, we create a new index which is a combination of other indices found in the literature. In the end, by applying the related trade data to the concept, calculations show that, for the period throughout 2011 and 2015 in general, Turkey has the highest complementary trade structure with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Qatar and Austria while Singapore, Malta, Greece, India and Japan emerge as the partner countries with the lowest complementarity with Turkey. The most important feature of this study, after all, is its being the first searching about the trade complementarity of Turkey