Are Investments and Imports Associated in the Long-term?: Evidence from Turkey.

In this paper we investigate the long-running association between investments and imports in Turkey using a dataset covering the 1980-2019 period, and employing the ARDL estimation technique. As a developing country, Turkey's economic growth relies on the import of raw materials and intermediate goods, and so the main hypothesis of this study claims that increases in investments lead to increases in imports in the long term in Turkey. The results of co-integration ARDL bounds tests show the series of imports and investments to be co-integrated, while long-term coefficient estimations reveal a positive and statistically significant relationship between import and investment series, and that a 1% increase in investments leads to a 0.1673% increase in imports in the long term in Turkey. Furthermore, diagnostic tests reveal the estimated model to have problems in terms of autocorrelation, heteroscedasticity, normality and model specification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]