Forecasting Turkey balance of trade with Box-Jenkins models

Foreign trade deficits are among the chronical problems of Turkey. Though export values have followed an increasing trend with the outward oriented development strategy adopted since 1980s, greater increase of import than export has converted the foreign trade deficits into a structural problem. Our study aims to estimate what sort of a tendency the mentioned process has exhibited using the data occurring since 2003. In the study, monthly export and import series of January 2003 - May 2008 period have been analyzed with Box-Jenkins models and approximate values of the following months have been obtained with the aid of these series. When estimations are made according to these models found suitable for import and export series, it is seen that the movements Of these series are similar again but the difference is still increasing till May 2009.