Turkish agricultural import and export demand functions: estimates from bounds testing approach

Abstract

This paper estimates the import and export demand functions for Turkish Agriculture based on the annual data for 1970-2003. The bounds testing approach to the cointegration and the error correction modeling is employed. We, however, adopt a new strategy in the model selection phase and select the optimal model from those models that satisfy both diagnostics and cointegration, thus, unlike the previous literature, ensuring that a statistically reliable and cointegrated model is picked up. Results indicate that for the import demand, relative price is a significant determinant in both short-run and long-run, nominal effective exchange rate matters only in the long-run, but domestic income is not at all a significant determinant for Turkish agricultural import demand. As for the export demand, while all determinants affect the export demand significantly in the short-run, given the relatively small share of Turkish agricultural exports within the world agricultural exports, none individually matters in the long-run