Target Market Selection for the Major Aquaculture Products of Turkey - An Evaluation on Export Markets by Hybrid Multi-criteria Decision-making Approach

Abstract

After 50 years of rapid development, today's aquaculture industry has become one of the driving forces of economic growth in many countries thanks to the increasing aquaculture production. However, less attention has been given to its growing global market demand and its contribution to relevant countries’ trade potential. Turkey has achieved significant success in aquaculture production dominated by Trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), Sea Bass (Dicentrarchus labrax), and Sea Bream (Dicentrarchus labrax)species thanks to its geographical and biodiversity advantages. Thereby, Turkey has an exporting advantage in the face of increasing global seafood consumption demand. In this paper, we focus on the target market selection of these priority products to support the exporting potential of Turkey. Therefore, this is a multicriterion problem, and this paper aims to provide forecasting about target markets based on qualitative and quantitative criteria by combining fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods. Seven criteria as trade balance, consumption, distance, average tariff, ease of doing business, non-tariff requirement and logistics performance index were chosen for evaluating the target markets. According to FAHP results, the trade balance criterion has the most significant effect while the distance criterion has least effect on the decision problem for ranking the target countries. According to these seven criteria, Japan is the best target market for Trout and Sea Bass while Russian Federation is the best for Sea Bream.