Gazi Mühendislik Bilimleri Dergisi

Öz

The world has become a global market with the development of communication and transportation technologies. With the globalization of the market, countries can import some products that cannot be produced due to various reasons such as natural resources, cost, climatic conditions, labor force or that require high costs, as well as import products that they produce or develop within the borders of the country if appropriate conditions are met. On the one hand, countries seek to ensure a sustainable structure for product groups in which they have a competitive advantage; on the other hand, they develop strategies to procure product groups in which they do not have a relative advantage under the most favorable conditions. In addition, with the strategies developed by the World Trade Organization, it is planned to realize international trade under free and transparent competition conditions and to increase the level of world welfare. In this study, it is aimed to cluster countries according to the product groups they export and import. While the data of OECD countries consisting of 37 countries are considered in the study, the data used in the analysis were obtained from the World Trade Organization. While clustering algorithms suitable for numerical data structure were used during the analysis of the study, Expectation Maximization and Canopy algorithms, which gave the most appropriate results when clustering OECD countries, were used. As a result of the analysis made according to Expectation Maximization and Canopy algorithms, countries were divided into four clusters in terms of exports and imports.