The Effect of Turkey's Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on Its External Trade: Counterfactual Impact Analysis

Abstract

The study aims to estimate the impact of Turkey's FTAs on its average external trade level by three novel approaches, which are the fixed effects counterfactual estimator (FEct), interactive fixed effect counterfactual (IFEct) estimator, and matrix completion (MC) method introduced by Liu et al (2022). The results show that while Turkey's FTAs have a positive impact on Turkey's exports to the economies that Turkey has FTAs, we do not find any significant effect on its imports on average. The findings show that Turkey's FTAs has increased its exports to these economies by 54.7% on average over five years after the FTAs entered into force. Moreover, placebo test results signal that the impact of these agreements on Turkey's export might occur before the agreements entered into force. As far as we know, this is the first study considering the effects of FTAs on countries trade by counterfactual estimators introduced by Liu et al (2022).