بررسي زمينه هاي مشاركت كشورهاي ساحلي دريايي خزر در تجارت كالايي

A Survey on Major Fields of Co-operation Among States of Caspian Sea in Commodity Trade

Fallowing the collapse of the former Soviet Union (USSR) , and the independence of Central Asian Republics, the number of The littoral States of Caspian Sea, increased from two to five and the region because of its large and vast natural resources and oil and gas deposits attracted the world attention, In this article attempts have been made to assess and evaluate the potentials of trade in goods between the five countries, namely Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran. For this purpose the Export - Import Similarity (EIS) approach has been employed. The period under consideration is 1997.2000. The results demonstrate that the volume of Intra - trade between these countries is less than 8 percent. One of the reasons behind such a weak performance is the low level of potentials in goods between each pair of countries concerned. Furthermore, the study shows that the average (EIS) index of all pairs of countries under consideration is 25. Based on these results the conclusion of the paper is that concluding multilateral trade agreements for trade in goods among these countries would not amount to considerable results and instead it is proposed that the trade cooperation be focused on other sectors such as trade in services and cooperation in activities such as extraction of minerals and processing, of mineral products. Finally the findings of the paper does not exclude the potentials of co-operation in trade in goods at bilateral level between sonic of the countries concerned.