Istanbul Airport (IGA) is located at the intersection of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, making it one of the largest international airports by passenger traffic volume in the world and a major hub for worldwide transportation routes, from North America to the Asia-Pacific Region. As a result of its geographical location, IGA is an important hub for intercontinental and intra-regional passenger travel, which helps create a significant economic impact through logistics and service exports, as well as Turkey's integration into global commerce. This research investigates the long-run relationship between air passenger traffic at Istanbul Airport and Turkish export activity over the period 2020-2025 using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to analyze monthly time-series data. The analysis shows that there is a statistically significant long-run cointegrating relationship among the variables, and that air passenger traffic, oil prices, exchange rates, and industrial production all have a positive and statistically significant impact on Turkish exports. Accordingly, Istanbul Airport's connectivity provides a measurable, structural contribution to enhancing Turkey's export performance, with important implications for trade policy and aviation infrastructure investment.
Yunus Emre Sürmen (Mon,) studied this question.