CAD Problem in Turkish Economy: An Application with Selected Macroeconomic Variables

Abstract

The main goal of the countries that want to increase the prosperity of their citizens is economic growth. As a result of worldwide economic and prosperity growth, consumption and energy usage increased significantly. Insufficiency of the local resources lead the countries to international trade. Growth of international trade and increase of financial transactions made the current account deficit (CAD) problem very important for the countries. Therefore, countries develop policies in order to understand the causes of the CAD and resolve them. Some of the factors that cause the CAD are excessive appreciation of the country’s currency, fast economic growth and increase in the imported oil prices. Increase of the CAD as a share of GDP lead economies to currency and/or financial crises by increasing their fragility. Thus, CAD preserves its actuality and significance as a problem for economies. In the last decades, the CAD issue became one of the chronical problems of Turkish economy. In this context, it is seen that Turkish economy adopted the growth with CAD strategy in last 20 years and always have CAD in this period except 1998 and 2001. In this study, the causality relation and long-term relationship of Turkey s current account balance (CAB), GDP, brent type oil prices, and real exchange rate are determined by using data of 2000: Q1-2016: Q2 . According to results, there is a bidirectional causality between CAD and GDP and one-way causality from oil prices to both GDP and CAD. In addition to causality relation, according the cointegration analysis, oil prices and GDP increase the CAD in the long run.