The Effect of Container Shipping On The Turkish Economy Aytaç Gökmen

Increasing trade volume and diversity of goods movements around the world have brought to the forefront the practical and high quality transfer of products. Today, many different products can be carried with different types of containers on the international scale. Modal transport is used in the transportation today where at least two of transport systems, i.e. road transport, rail transport, air transport, sea transport, pipelines are used. However, especially sea transport is used in international transportation, that’s why the containerization is called industrialization of maritime transport.

In this study, primarily general information is given about container description, history of container transportation, container types, container ships, ports and handling equipment and evaluation is made about container shipping and ports in the World and in Turkey. The effect of container shipping on the economy is considerable. In order to examine the presence of this effect, relationship between container shipping and economic growth in Turkey is examined by using the quarterly data between 2004Q1–2017Q3 by means of several econometric methods.

As a result of co-integration tests, the existence of a positive bi-directional relationship has been found between TEU-type total handling which represents the container transportation in the long run andreal GDP (Gross Domestic Product) which represents representing economic growth.

As a result of the Granger causality test -although the sign of the relationship is not clear in the short term – it has been understood that actual changes in income affect the changes in the total handling. As a result of the impulse response analyze, the effect of change in real income have always positive effect on total handling except for the 5th and 6th periods; as a result of the variance degradation. 69percentage of change in total handling is explained by variable itself and 31 percentage is explained by reel GDP. It is concluded that there is a positive meaningful relationship between the change in the real income and the change in the total handling in the result of the estimation of the OLS. Accordingly, as a result of the findings, it is seen that there is a relationship between economic growth and container transportation in both short and long terms. Having a sustainable rate of economic growth in Turkey, especially in short run will also increase total container handling in terms of TEU. Besides especially in the long run, increase in total container handling in terms of TEU triggers the increase in economic growth. In this regard the container transportation have said that it is very important for Turkey.