The Trade Complementarity of Islamic Development Bank Group Member Countries, the Current Trade Level and Development of the Counter Trade among Them

In the current conditions of world trade, there are some potential opportunities to achieve highly potential trade relationships among the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) Group member countries. In accordance with the principles of Shari’ah (Islamic Law), The IDB Group was established in 1975 in order to help the economic development and social progress of member countries and this group now has 56 member countries whichin order to strengthen the cooperation among them, it conducts planning at different levels. In this study, export and import information of the countries which is presented and classified at 255 commodity items in the site of United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has been used to calculate the trade complementarity cosine of average of exports and imports of member countries during 2010 to 2012 and MATLAB software is used for these calculations. This indicator implies the degree of compliance of export structure of a country with import structure of another country. The results are represented by a 56*56 square matrix that each entry implies the potential degree of trade complementarity between two countries. The priorities of import destinations are also specified based on the degree of higher trade complementarity. However, the analysis of current trade level of member countries indicates that only 16 % of exports are intra-group. For imports, this ratio is 20%. Additionally, among fifty six Group member countries only eighteen countries export more than 30% of their goods to the other members and also, only twenty one countries import more than 30% of their goods from other members. So with regard to such conditions, the establishment of a clearing house in the IDB Group and development of the counter trade among those member countries which have desirable degree of trade complementarity are proposed as an opportunity for effective trade development.

کلیدواژه ها:

Trade Potential ، Islamic Development Bank Group (IDB Group) ، Cosine Index ، Trade Complementarity Index ، United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)