Effect of silk road railway on international trade :|an analysis of the Turkish case

Abstract

For long centuries, Silk Roads were always a point of interest for kings and states. Even for modern government, Silk Roads are always seen as trade boosters. In the past few years, Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) Silk Road has been a hot topic for its partner countries. Huge budgets were planned for investment with the aim of expanding the international trade drastically. As several stages of BTK Silk Road have been accomplished, big planned projects are still going on or yet to be launched. With the continuous spending along with big promises a need for progress check arises. In this study, trade indices for Turkey have been collected for the past 19 years. The indices included international imports, exports, total trade, trade of specific product categories, and trade with the specific BTK partners: Georgia, Azerbaijan, and China. The data was analyzed using regression test on SPSS and MS Excel. The regression was generally between the Turkish railway capacity (ton-km) and trade volume (1000$). Most of the hypothesis were found to be statistically significant and showed that railway capacity had positive effect on the trade volume. Moreover, some of the accepted hypothesis could potentially explain certain observations in the Turkish trade. The study had several limitations such as working with limited data points, testing the effect of BTK that has recently started operating, and as trade volume was measured in US dollars, the inflation in exchange rate was not put into consideration.