Modeling and Forecasting Foreign Trade Values in Medical Devices.

Objectives: Forecasting foreign trade values can be a good guidance to enable policymakers to introduce efficient instruments to regulate the medical device market. The purpose of this study is to forecast Turkey's medical device export and import values for the next 5 years.

Methods: To that end, we identified the universal HS-6 commodity codes associated with medical devices, and then retrieved foreign trade data from the ITC Trademap database. We proposed Box-Jenkins autoregressive integrated moving average model in forecasting foreign trade values for upcoming years.

Results: Turkey's foreign trade analysis has shown there is a 14% decrease in import and 21% increase in export in past 5 years. The Asian region is the main target market in medical device export with the rate of 42.8%, and most importers of Turkey are located in Europe region. The results show that the total value of imports is expected to reach $1.78 billion, and the total value of exports is expected to reach $720 million by 2023.

Conclusions: It is concluded that Turkey may have a larger medical device market in the next 5 years, which provides an appropriate environment for investment. We believe that the results are promising and our approach can be adopted in other countries.