ABSTRACT
As the volume of international trade across countries has been increasing worldwide at a rapid pace for about the last three decades, import dependency has been a topic of interest in the literature, especially for developing countries. The aim of this study is to estimate the import dependency of Turkey on the basis of a comparison between exported products and products for domestic use. Therefore, imported inputs are no longer assumed to be used in the same intensity for exports and for domestic sale. Since officially released input-output tables are estimated using the assumption of industry homogeneity in production technologies across firms, import intensity differences in exports and non-exports do not exist in these tables. Therefore, a distinction between exporters and non-exporters must be made. To this end, a new estimation method is proposed. In this estimation strategy, the firm-level data provided by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT) are used. By using the firm-level data and by separating the exporters and non-exporters for each industry, imported input coefficient matrices for the year 2012 of both exporters and non-exporters are estimated. Then import requirement of both exports and non-exports for Turkish economy are estimated by using the input-output framework.
