A. Suut Dogruel

Macroeconomics of Turkey's agricultural reforms: an intertemporal computable general equilibrium analysis

Turkey recently launched a set of structural reforms to address elimination of producer price subsidies in its agriculture, and replacing them with a targeted direct income transfer program. The paper investigates analytically viable options of the proposed agricultural-cum-fiscal reform and analyzes the formal links between the public sector fiscal balances, accumulation patterns, dynamic resource allocation, and consumer welfare under a medium-long-term horizon. We utilize a dynamic general equilibrium model. The model results suggest that even though there are expected modest welfare gains of consumers’ intertemporal efficiency, the repercussions of these policies on the rural economy and aggregate gross domestic product are likely to be deflationary.

Economic Growth and Structural Change in Turkey 1960–88

After almost five decades of industrialization—characterized, on the one hand, by considerable state intervention and, on the other, by protectionist import-substituting policies in domestic capital formation—in the early 1980s Turkey ostensibly entered a new era of export-led economic growth. Since 1960, the Turkish democracy has experienced a series of crises with astonishingly regular ten-year cycles of recurrence. The 1980 military intervention, however, brought about a radical attempt to restructure the economy, hardly comparable with the rather gradual changes in its recent economic history. Its ten years of experimentation with economic liberalization and structural adjustment provide us today with an adequate record to identify and discuss at least the salient features of this period by comparing the performance of the economy in different years.