Distinguished guests and esteemed participants,
Over two days, we have discussed together a period in which it is not only the direction of global trade that is changing, but the very logic of decision-making. Bringing together the business experience of the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce, the academic capacity of Istanbul Ticaret University and the research strength of the Research and Project Development Academy (DÜPA), our Congress, held in our university’s 25th year, brought representatives of universities and institutions from around the world to the same table. Vice President Dr Cevdet Yılmaz took part as Guest of Honour, and participants included the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the World Trade Organization, the World Trade Point Federation, EY Türkiye, PwC Türkiye, Musu International, The University of Manchester, University of Sussex Business School, Istanbul 29 Mayıs University, Ankara Social Sciences University and Istanbul Zaim University.
For over thirty years, the multilateral trading system offered the world predictability, transparency and a common set of rules. Today, many of the assumptions that sustained this order are losing their validity. As was said at the opening, we live in a world that “steadily produces instability”. Crises, pandemics, wars and energy shocks are no longer exceptions; they have become the norm. We therefore cannot define stability as the absence of change. Stability is the ability to read change correctly, to manage uncertainty, and to build structures that endure when conditions shift. As the Vice President also emphasised, in such a period of growing instability, a significant window of opportunity is opening for countries that are able to preserve their own stability.
As the Chairman of the Board of the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce, Mr Şekib Avdagiç, stressed, competition is no longer won on price and quality alone. Access to finance, delivery reliability, regulatory compliance and knowledge capacity are now direct components of competitiveness.
As our Congress Chair, Prof. Dr Nazım Ekren, noted, calm periods can also be deceptive: looking only at average and headline values of indicators causes us to overlook vulnerabilities. If a period of stability is spent unprepared, stability is squandered; if no lessons are drawn from a crisis, the crisis is wasted.
The data shared at our Congress revealed a striking reality: despite all these pressures, global trade has reached record levels. Globalisation is not ending; its nature is changing. In everyday consumer goods and standard services, trade continues to operate largely according to market rules. In strategic areas such as advanced technology chips, artificial intelligence, critical minerals, energy and critical medicines, however, security logic is now decisive. Production in these areas is concentrated in a few centres, and global investment is flowing rapidly into these sectors. In short, we are in an era of selective globalisation.
The structure of trade is also changing. Services now make up the bulk of inputs in global supply chains, and digitally delivered services have become the engine of this growth. Trade among developing countries is growing faster than the world average, and these countries’ share of global exports has almost reached one half. Asia’s rise as a hub of production and technology is carrying the world from a structure dominated by a few main corridors towards a multipolar network of interconnected regional ecosystems. The message for our business community is clear: markets are no longer found only in advanced economies.
The concept that stood out at the Congress in explaining this transformation was “managed interdependence”. Countries are not decoupling from one another. However, interdependence is now being managed, and it is not always equal; an asymmetry is emerging in favour of those who hold advanced technology and strategic industries. The real question, therefore, is not which bloc we belong to, but in which areas, on whom and to what extent we are dependent. The strong are those who can change their suppliers, routes and standards when necessary.
Security-motivated trade measures and non-tariff barriers are both on the rise. In some cases, the cost of complying with these barriers even exceeds the tariff itself. Yet the research shared at our Congress reminded us of an important fact: openness to trade and supply diversity are among the most powerful tools for reducing economic volatility. In other words, openness is not the rival of economic security, but more often its guarantee. In scenarios where cooperation collapses, the world suffers heavy losses, whereas the path of reform brings gains for all; in both cases, the most fragile economies feel the greatest impact. Security measures must therefore be kept limited to genuinely critical areas and proportionate, and the areas where cooperation is still possible must be carefully preserved. Otherwise, reciprocal retaliation deepens fragmentation. Resilience does not mean turning inwards; it means knowing one’s dependencies and keeping alternatives ready. This also assigns a new task to economic diplomacy: the public sector and firms must act together not only when entering new markets, but also when monitoring geopolitical risks and safeguarding supply security.
At a time when multilateral rule-making is slowing, rules are increasingly being written in bilateral and regional agreements. New-generation agreements now extend to areas such as data protection, digital markets and trade secrets, and intellectual property is becoming a direct subject of trade through software, trademarks and licences. This creates dynamism, but it also brings a complex structure in which different standards and rules of origin are intertwined. Large companies can adapt to this; SMEs and small economies struggle. That is why a flexible yet inclusive multilateralism that puts development at its centre, a dispute settlement mechanism that works for everyone, and new rules for the digital economy, data governance and sustainable supply chains are indispensable for the future of trade. Developing economies must have a seat at the table where these rules are written, not remain on the sidelines.
The key to striking this balance is knowledge. Today, the decision-maker’s problem is not a lack of data but an abundance of it. Trade data is moving from recording to connecting, from seeing to foreseeing, and finally to deciding. The systems of yesterday asked, “Where is the cargo?”; today’s question is, “What will we do if conditions change?” For this reason, competitive intelligence was addressed at our Congress not as a substitute for economic analysis, but as a decision-making capacity that complements it. The competitive advantage of the future will come not from collecting more data, but from preparing in advance the right decisions for different possible scenarios.
However, technology does not create business opportunities by itself; it needs bridges that connect it to the market. There is a shift from technology transfer to technology partnership, that is, to co-development. At this point, chambers, trade promotion organisations and business associations assume a critical function. Technology provides scale; human networks provide trust, local knowledge and relationships. In the digital economy, trust is becoming one of the most valuable forms of infrastructure.
The same logic applies to green and digital transformation. Environmental information is no longer data that stays in reports; it is part of the working infrastructure of trade. This information must be produced once at its source, verified reliably, and shared without being re-entered at every step. Single window systems, digital customs and electronic documents can be the carriers of this new structure. The goal is not a single global system, but a structure in which different systems can communicate with one another through common standards. To ensure that our SMEs are not left behind in this transformation, simple, proportionate and accessible solutions are essential.
On the financing side, one sentence that stood out at our Congress sums it all up: what cannot be insured cannot be financed. Insurance is no longer merely a product that comes into play after a loss. It is an actor that shares risk, mobilises capital and, as a long-term investor, can finance the energy transition. Insured economies recover from shocks in months, not years. For our country, which knows the reality of disasters at first hand, this once again shows how vital public–private cooperation is. Reliable risk data expands insurance capacity, and insurance capacity expands investment. This link is particularly important ahead of the global climate summit that our country will host at the end of the year.
All these developments hold great opportunities for Türkiye. As Chairman Avdagiç said at the opening, the rebuilding of global trade with a perspective of responsibility would be incomplete without Türkiye. The analyses shared at our Congress also showed that global actors reconfiguring supply chains see Türkiye as an economy that connects different centres of power. Türkiye’s real opportunity is to go beyond being a transit country and to become a nodal economy that facilitates the movement of goods, services, capital and people. The way to achieve this lies through a functioning legal system, reliable arbitration, predictable regulation and a commercial infrastructure aligned with international standards.
The Global Trade Hubs Index, being developed by DÜPA, seeks to answer precisely this question: what truly makes a country a global trade hub? The Index measures not how much trade countries conduct, but their capacity to be a trade hub. In doing so, it considers together the extent to which a country is connected to global networks, that is, its connectivity, and the economic, commercial and financial climate it offers. It brings together different dimensions, from logistics to institutional quality, from human capital to digital and financial capacity and sustainability, in a single data-driven framework that can be tracked over the years. The first findings of the pilot study are instructive. Economic size alone does not guarantee hub status; the most decisive factors are institutional quality and human capital. Countries that strengthen in logistics can fall behind in sustainability, which suggests that the trade hubs of the future will be not the fastest, but the most sustainable. Being irreplaceable is possible not through geography, but through the function one performs and the connectivity that carries that function.
Türkiye’s picture also becomes clear within this framework. We are in a strong position in logistics, and Istanbul stands out in global city networks; in institutional quality, however, we lag behind. The road ahead runs from being a transit country to a regional production base, and from there to a global trade hub. As emphasised in the Istanbul Trade Hub Report prepared by DÜPA, the fact that Istanbul has been one of the region’s leading centres of trade and finance throughout history is a reminder of how deep the roots of this role run. But geographical advantage is not in itself a strategic superiority: what will turn our greatest asset, our location, into a lasting advantage is not only ports and airports, but knowledge, institutional capacity and cooperation.
Our Congress has also left us with new questions. Artificial intelligence is no longer a sector in its own right, but a force accelerating all sectors. So how far should these systems support decisions, where should human judgement step in, and who should bear responsibility for the final decision? When data and analytical competencies become standard for everyone tomorrow, where will competitive advantage come from? Will data have stored without producing any value turn into the digital waste of the future? These questions show how important it is to educate the trade professional of the future. Universities are becoming natural research partners for new technology companies growing with venture capital. This calls on universities and the business world to discuss tomorrow’s competencies together, today.
As the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Istanbul Ticaret University, Dr İsrafil Kuralay, reminded us, Montesquieu said, “Peace is the natural effect of trade.” The research shared at our Congress also confirms that trade has historically reduced conflict. A trading order in which ideas and knowledge circulate alongside goods, and in which rules are predictable, shows that stability is also a social value. That is why the question posed by DÜPA’s book Trade, Technology, Contemplation matters: will businesses and societies be able to place the question “What value are we creating, and how?” alongside “How can I earn more?”
Distinguished participants,
The fundamental conclusion we have reached at the end of these two days is this: the issue is not a choice between more or less globalisation. The real issue is through which institutions, rules, data and relationships of trust we will sustain trade in a world where uncertainty has become permanent. The test of the coming period is to strike the right balance between efficiency and resilience, between openness and measured security, and between growth and development-centred inclusiveness, on the basis of interoperability and responsibility.
History shows us this: the turning points that determined the direction of the global economy were often shaped in cities where different actors gathered around shared principles, and those cities became etched in memory by their names. The principles of a previous era struggle to answer today’s questions. The world needs a new shared understanding that makes efficiency no longer the sole yardstick. Istanbul, which for centuries has brought together East and West, North and South, different markets and different rules, is more ready than ever to host this quest.
The principles we have voiced here are a beginning for this understanding. In the coming period, we aim to mature these principles with broader participation, and to turn them into a common framework that the public sector, the business world, academia and international organisations can embrace together.
The Istanbul Trade Congress was designed as a permanent university–business platform to be held every three years, but the work done here will continue uninterrupted in the interim. The real value of this platform will be to bring the problems faced by the business world onto the research agenda, and to feed the knowledge produced in academia back into decision-making processes. The work under DÜPA Horizon is the first step taken on this path. What we cannot measure, we cannot manage. At our next meeting, we hope to evaluate together not only how the world has changed, but also how far the step we are taking today from Istanbul has come.
I thank everyone who contributed and extend my respects.