Trends in Foreign Trade of Cherry and Turkey’s Comparative Advantage

Global cherry demand has increased and the market has grown. Turkey is the third largest exporter country in the world for cherry. The objective of this study is to analyze the Turkish cherry sector’s competitive power in international trade. In the study, Balassa’s Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) and Vollrath’s indexes were used. The cherry trade data is obtained from the International Trade Center (ITC-TRADEMAP) database and calculated for the years between 2001-2017. For this purpose, the Chile, USA, Hong Kong, China, Turkey, Spain Austria, Uzbekistan, New Zealand, Canada, Greece, Netherlands, Italy and Australia were taken into account as the most exporter countries in the world. Turkey’s world cherry export is around 124 million dollars on avarage for the period of 2001-2017. When the shares of the exporting countries are examined; EU countries seem to be a significant market. At the same time, The Russian Federation for the last ten years has become an important country for Turkey. According to calculated Balassa’s and Vollrath’s indexes, Turkey has a significant comparative advantage in the cherry export. However, Turkey’s comparative advantage has relatively been decreasing in recent years. From this point of view, it is very important to develop new markets for existing market demands