Meltem Ucal

The Personality and Leadership Style of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: Implications for Turkish Foreign Policy

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is clearly the most controversial figure in recent Turkish political history. His preponderance in political life is remarkable even by Turkish standards. Because Erdoğan is so powerful and has effectively weakened most internal checks on his power, any attempt to explain Turkeys recent foreign policy outcomes will be seriously lacking without considering his leadership impact. The purpose of this study is to investigate Erdoğans worldview and leadership style, and evaluate their impact on his governments policy processes and outputs. To do that, we employ the Leadership Trait Analysis technique to construct the leadership profile of Erdoğan through content analysis of his verbal records while in office. We contend here that our understanding of AKP-era Turkey is enhanced if we offer a systematic and rigorous account of Erdoğans personality, and that he presents a clear example of the importance of taking individual-level variables seriously in foreign policy analysis.

Gender and the Wage Gap in Turkish Academia

Turkey maintains one of the lowest female labour force participation rates in Europe, but also boasts an above average number of female professors. Turkey is well above the European average (15 per cent) with approximately 28 per cent of full professorships being occupied by women. Despite these seemingly positive indications, do men and women in Turkish academia earn the same wages? This study explores whether or not there exists a gendered pay gap in Turkish academia. Using data collected from a survey of more than 700 Turkish academics, we observed that there is a gendered wage gap that disadvantages women, but only at the highest pay levels found at private universities indicating the existence of intra-class inequality, where men and women despite occupying the same class position are compensated differently.

Is Fiscal Policy Sustainable in Turkey

The issue of the budget deficit has become one of the main themes of the economic policy implemented in Turkey and backed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) following the economic crisis of 2001. The main motivation for this study is the question of whether or not the governments financial policy is sustainable and satisfies the governments long-term budget constraint. The empirical analysis is based on tests of whether government expenditure and revenue are cointegrated, considering the economic liberalization period of 1989-2008. The stability of fiscal policy is examined using the Johansen multivariate cointegration method. The findings of the sustainability tests indicate that fiscal policy from the liberalization of the economy up until the 2001 economic crisis was not sustainable.

Energy-saving behavior of Turkish women: A consumer survey on the use of home appliances:

This paper focuses on energy-related attitudes and behaviors of Turkish women, who are the main users of electrical home appliances responsible for most household energy consumption. Answers from 1323 female respondents surveyed through a unique questionnaire formed the dataset. The results from analysis of variance show that education has a significant effect on the relationship between energy saving and awareness and attitudes about climate change. Significant differences also exist between education level groups in terms of knowledge of the classification of energy-saving electrical home appliances. Responses to questions related to energy-saving purchasing behaviors are consistently higher for knowledgeable respondents. The paper then uses factor analysis and ordinal logit models to reveal interactions between energy-saving behavior regarding electrical home appliances and several factors, namely awareness, sensitivity, essentials, and receptiveness. The identification of these factors can provide useful insights for policy makers that enable them to construct energy-saving policies specifically tailored toward women.

Income inequality and FDI: evidence with Turkish data

ABSTRACT This article explores how foreign direct investment (FDI) and other determinants impact income inequality in Turkey in the short- and long-run. We apply the nonlinear auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) modelling approach, which is suitable for small samples. The data for the study cover the years from 1970 to 2008. The empirical results indicate the existence of a co-integration relationship among the variables with asymmetric adjustment of the income distribution in the short- and long-run. The negative impact of FDI on the Gini coefficient, decreasing income inequality, is statistically significant in the short- and long-run, though with a quantitatively small impact in both cases. In the short run, GDP growth increases inequality initially, an effect that is reversed in the next period, increases in domestic gross capital formation decreases inequality, and increases in the literacy rate have very minor adverse effects on income equality. However, in the long run these variables have no statistically significant effects on the Gini coefficient. A reduction in the population growth rate reduces inequality in the short run but has no effect in the long run, whereas an increase in the rate reduces inequality in the long run but has no effect in the short run.

Walter Leal Filho, Diana-Mihaela Pociovalisteanu and Abul Quasem Al-Amin (eds): Sustainable economic development: green economy and green growth

This book’s content is what its title suggests, 18 articles by 36 researchers on sustainable economic development, the green economy and green growth. It is one of the sets of interdisciplinary books by Springer World Sustainability Series and focuses on economic growth with ecological concerns. This specialization is well defined, as the book features a careful organization of articles, in terms of scope and depth. It overall fulfills its promise of filling gaps in our understanding of green growth, and various chapters of this book discuss some of the most important related issues. Despite a broad consensus that we face a global environmental crisis, the authors differ regarding the scale of the social changes required to overcome it. This book advocates approaching the subject from a green economic perspective and a green growth ideology in order to cope with the crisis. Several chapters analyze sustainable development, the green economy, green growth and related concepts, while others examine the subject descriptively, methodologically and statistically or through country case studies. The book starts with ‘‘Industrial Symbiosis: An Innovative Tool for Promoting Green Growth,’’ which examines the limitations and advantages of applying concepts like industrial symbiosis, ecological innovation, and industrial ecology in order to encourage green growth. A related chapter discusses biotechnology (p. 127), which is one of the areas of most intensive scientific research, making it important to promote innovation and facilitate access to tax incentives for private companies to achieve bio-industrial development. Another chapter argues that world waste is driven by population, economic growth, and urbanization. The chapter statistically compares waste generation globally, both currently and for 2025. By graphing the relationship between per capita income and waste generation, the author demonstrates that the highest income countries are producing the most waste (p. 35). Using recent statistics from 2000 to 2015, the chapter reviews recent research on waste composition, disposal, treatment technologies, and prevention to

Karl W. Steininger, Martin König, Birgit Bednar-Friedl, Lukas Kranzl, Wolfgang Loibl, Franz Prettenthaler (eds): Economic evaluation of climate change impacts development of a cross-sectoral framework and results for Austria

Economic Evaluation of Climate Change Impacts Development of a Cross-Sectoral Framework and Results for Austria edited by Karl W. Steininger, Martin König, Birgit Bednar-Friedl, Lukas Kranzl, Wolfgang Loibl, Franz Prettenthaler is a research monograph and a volume of Springer Climate Series, an interdisciplinary book series dedicated to climate research. It consists of 4 parts and 22 chapters contributed by 47 researchers, establishing a major effort to fill the gaps in our understanding of the Economic Evaluation of Climate Change Impacts. The book handles the issue of climate change—a threat that modern societies of the world are faced with and that could a catastrophe and inevitably an end to human race. However, the significance of the book mostly stems from the very large scope of its featured research in terms of variety of areas looked into and careful measurement (or estimation, on occasion) of variables used. This book presents a carefully conducted research with robust results in detail and with sufficient support and discussion from the literature. The main objective is to ‘‘show how, at the national scale, relevant societal information on climate change impacts can be generated’’ (p. 5). It therefore offers new methods and findings about economic assessment of climate change impact and macroeconomic feedbacks at a national scale and also characterizes the effects of climate change not just in physical, biological and social terms but also in the way of economics and the long-term data used in this book to estimate results. One of the most identifying and distinguishing aspects of the book’s subject research rests in its precise and well-defined limitation of remaining at national scale, hence filtering most of the corrupted or unreliable data out, enabling the researchers keep