The effect of the economic reforms of the 1980s and the Customs Union Agreement of 1996 upon the Turkish intra-industry trade

In this paper, we analyse the impact of the economic reforms implemented in the 1980s and of the Customs Union Agreement of 1996 on the intra-industry trade in Turkey. We use panel data for 20 trading partners of Turkey and the sample period from 1969 until 2009. Controlling for the effects of standard determinants of intra-industry trade proposed in the literature, we find strong statistical evidence of the positive impact of both reforms on the intra-industry trade measured either by the Grubel-Lloyd or the Brülhart's indices.