Economic Crisis as an Instigator of Distributional Conflict: The Turkish Case in 2001

Fikret Şenses

The study assesses the socioeconomic impact of the recent crisis in Turkey which started in the financial sector but soon made its presence felt in a wide range of other spheres. It argues that the impact of the crisis should be examined against the background of the neoliberal policies that have been in force since 1980 and the momentum of powerful structural factors most of which carried over from an even earlier period. After a brief discussion of the main conceptual and statistical difficulties confronted in assessing and isolating the impact of the crisis, the study investigates its effect in spheres such as production, employment, unemployment, wages, poverty, and income distribution and draws attention to its negative impact. To have a more complete view of its overall impact, the study also considers the response of the government, international organizations, and households to the crisis.

Dynamics of the trade balance: The Turkish J-curve

Elif Akbostancı

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The J-curve hypothesis suggests a specific pattern for the response of trade balance to real exchange rate changes: a real depreciation initially worsens the trade balance, but through time the trade balance improves, and thus the response of the trade balance over time generates a tilted J shape. This study investigates the existence of a J-curve in the Turkish data in the period of 1987-2000, by using quarterly data. First an error correction model is estimated to differentiate between the long-run equilibrium and short-run dynamics. Then the response of trade balance to real exchange rate shocks are investigated by using the generalized impulse response methodology. Even though the suggested long-run pattern, which is the improvement of the trade balance in response to a real depreciation emerges, our results do not exactly support the J-curve hypothesis in the short-run. In this study we found that the short-run behavior of the trade balance in response to real exchange rate shocks show an S-pattern reminiscent of the Backus et al (1994) rather than the J-curve pattern.

Macroeconomic instability, capital accumulation and growth: The case of Turkey 1963-1999

Mustafa İsmihan , Kıvılcım Metin Özcan and Aysit Tansel

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This study investigates the empirical relationships between macroeconomic instability, capital accumulation and growth in Turkey over the period 1963-1999. We use recent time series econometric techniques, such as cointegration and impulse response analysis, to analyze empirical relationships between the variables of interest. The results of this paper suggest that the chronic and increasing macroeconomic instability of the Turkish economy has seriously affected her capital formation and hence her growth. Furthermore, chronic macroeconomic instability seems to become a serious impediment to the public investment, especially, its infrastructure component, and shattered or, even reversed the complementarity between public and private investment in the long-run. Therefore, Turkish experience has shown that macroeconomic instability not only deteriorates economic growth but it could also reverse the complementarity between public and private investment in the long-run.

Credit transmission mechanism in Turkey: An empirical investigation

Tarkan Çavuşoğlu

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The purpose of the study is to empirically test the presence of a bank lending channel in the Turkish economy. The empirical investigations are focused on the bank lending behaviour of 58 deposit money banks in the Turkish banking system over the period 1988-1999. The estimation methodology of the empirical analysis differs from that of similar studies in the literature, providing econometrically more efficient model estimates through exploiting dynamic panel data modelling with Generalized Method of Moments estimations. The results of the model estimations provide no evidence of a potential for a bank lending channel to exist in the Turkish economy. Such an outcome is reflected in the lack of a significant relationship between the change in the monetary policy indicator and the growth rate of the loan supply in the estimated models. Categorizing the loan supply responses of banks with respect to bank size differences has not provided any significant improvement in revealing the evidence of a bank lending channel. The empirical results indicate that bank lending behaviour is influenced significantly by bank specific factors, such as the balance sheet strength and the quality of the asset portfolio, and by debt sales to the banking system.

The dynamics of entry and exit in turkish manufacturing industry*

Seçil Kaya and Yeşim Üçdoğruk

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Abstract: Entry and exit are crucial elements of market selection process which leads to the restructuring, adaptation and evolution of an industry. While the importance of entry and exit has been recognised, attention has focused almost exclusively on quantifying barriers to them, rather than on investigating the determinants of entry and exit and measuring the magnitude of these processes. This paper analyses the entry and exit dynamics of Turkish manufacturing industry defined at the 4-digit ISIC level for the period 1981-1997. While, on the one hand, inflation targeting focuses on the determinants of entry and exit and their sectoral variation, on the other hand, inflation targeting verifies the link between entry and exit. This paper employs a dynamic panel data estimation procedure to investigate the relationship between entry and exit and to estimate the models of entry and exit. Our empirical findings suggest that rates of entry and exit are determined by profit margin, growth rate of output, concentration ratio, labor productivity, average wage rate, advertisement intensity, capital intensity and wage and productivity differentials as explanatory variables.

Who benefits from training and R&D: The firm or the workers? A study on panels of French and Swedish firms

Gérard Ballot , Fathi Fakhfakh and Erol Taymaz

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The present paper offers a novel study of the effects of intangible assets on wages and productivity. Training, R&D, and physical capital are all taken into account, and their joint effects examined. We use panels of firms in order to control for unobserved fixed effects and the potential endogeneity of training and R&D, and have been able to obtain data for two different countries, France and Sweden, in order to explore the effects of institutional or national specificity. The estimation of productivity and wage equations allows us to show how the benefits of investment in physical capital, R&D and training are shared between the firm and the workers. Although the workers obtain significant benefits, the study shows that the firm obtains the largest return on the investments it makes. This is true not only for physical capital and R&D, but also for training. It suggests that firms can rationally invest in training and that the issue of under-investment in training should be re-examined.