1 Revealed Comparative Advantage and Competitiveness: A Case Study for Turkey towards the EU Competitiveness of Turkish Fruit and Vegetable Sectors in EU Market

This paper seeks to quantify the extent to which Turkey has a comparative advantage on tomato, olive oil, and fruit juice industries and how this has changed over the period between 1995 and 2005 in the EU market. To study Turkey’s competitiveness and its progress two widely used indexes are calculated, revealed comparative advantage (RCA) and comparative export performance (CEP). Moreover; import demand functions of EU are estimated for rival countries. In this regression analysis our hypothesis is that if Turkey is competitor for these countries, its price will have statistically significant effect on export demand functions. Both index and regression results indicate that Turkey has a strikingly high comparative advantage in fruit juice and olive oil markets in the EU but not in tomato market. Key words: agriculture, fruit and vegetable industry, competitiveness, reveale