Who is Trading Well in Central Asia? A Gravity Analysis of Exports from the Regional Powers to the Region

Abstract

Since early 90s major regional powers have attempted to increase their export flows to Central Asia. This paper assesses the volume of recent export flows from China, India, Iran, Russia and Turkey to countries in Central Asia. We estimate an augmented gravity model and conduct trade complementarity analysis to compare the factual export volumes with projections generated by the model. We find that China and Turkey were the most successful. They have expanded their exports beyond numbers predicted by the augmented gravity model. Up until 2007 Russia failed to achieve model benchmarks. Exports from India and Iran remain very negligible.