Contribution of fishery and aquaculture products to Turkish foreign trade: An evaluation by a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making method

Fisheries and aquaculture industry, which provides a continuous and high-return market advantage to potential countries, is also one of the priority industries for Turkey. Although Turkey has important advantages with its geographic position and bio-diversity, the industry's contribution to foreign trade is not at an acceptable level. Accordingly, it is important to evaluate the capture fishery and aquaculture products, which provide the best contribution to the foreign trade of Turkey. Thus, the present paper aims to provide foreign trade executives with an intuition about the most appropriate products to invest in and contributing products to Turkish foreign trade within the scope of market strategies. Entropy-WASPAS, which is a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making method, is used for evaluating the contribution of fishery and aquaculture products to Turkish foreign trade. This model includes both criteria (production, import quantity, import value, export quantity, export value) and alternatives (trout, sea bream, sea bass, sprat, atlantic bonito, anchovy, horse mackerel, pilchard, sea snail, prawn, cuttle fish, mussel). Entropy is used to determine the criteria weights, and WASPAS is applied for ranking the fishery and aquaculture products. According to the results, export value is the most important criteria while Sea Bream is found as the most significant product for Turkey’s foreign trade.