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International trade depends on networking, interaction and in-person meetings which stimulate cross-border travels. The countries are seeking policies to encourage inbound mobility to support bilateral trade, tourism, and foreign direct investments. Some nations have been implementing liberal visa regimes as an important part of facilitating policies in view of security concerns. Turkey has been among the nations introducing liberal visa policies to support trade in the last decade and recorded significant increases in the volumes of exports. In this paper, we employed machine learning methodologies, Support vector machines (SVM) and Neural networks (NN), to investigate the facilitating impact of liberal visa policies on bilateral trade, using the export data from Turkey for the period of 2000-2014. The research disentangled the variables that have the strongest impact on trade utilizing SVM and NN models and exhibited that visa policies have significant impacts on the bilateral trade. More relaxed visa policies are recommended for the countries in the pursuit of increasing exports.

The effectiveness of websites has an impact on the representation of a SME and can have an effect on foreign trade. Thus, developing a reliable and robust model to assess the effectiveness of SME websites is important for researchers and practitioners. The aim of the study is to propose a SME website efficiency evaluation methodology from an international trade perspective. Determining the effectiveness of websites is a multi-dimensional decision-making problem which encompasses the assessment of information quality, system quality, and service quality. The criteria and sub-criteria affecting website effectiveness were determined through literature research and expert panel assistance. AHP method was utilized to determine the relative weights of the evaluation criteria in the study. Then, fuzzy linguistic variables were adopted to rank the websites of SMEs engaged in foreign trade. The proposed evaluation model identifies key factors regarding the criteria and sub-criteria of a website effectiveness. The model can provide a helpful reference in designing useful websites which are an important task for SMEs involved in international trade.

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