A Research on the Competitiveness of Turkish Textile and Clothing Industries in the International Markets

Textile and clothing industries acted as a catalyst for the industrialization process in most of the developed countries and played an important role in their economic progress. Today, these two industries are taking crucial parts in the advancement of developing countries through generating employment capacity, production volume and export revenues. These mentioned sectors, similarly, had a significant contribution to the prosperity of Turkish economy especially for the last three decades. Turkey became one of the leader players of the global textile and clothing market, into which it joined through the implementation of export based growth strategy after 1980. In 2010, 3.6% of the world textile and clothing export was achieved by Turkey, whereas EU-27 procured 8% and 5% of its textile and clothing imports from Turkey, respectively. This work is a literature review which investigates former research studies that studied the competitiveness of Turkish textile and clothing industries in the global market in terms of Porter s Diamond Model, Balassa s Revealed Comparative Advantage Index and Vollrath s Competitive Advantage Indices.