Disclaimer: The views herein are strictly my own. I am grateful for comments from and discussions with a number of current and former EBRD employees. [Updated as of Dec 3, 2020. Now includes comparisons with EIB investments and human rights outcomes. Since the publishing of this blog post, there has also been some threatening emails [ ]
Since the referendum last Sunday, there has been much discussion over the relatively high support for the YES-vote in Turkey s predominantly-Kurdish Eastern part of the country. To give a quick visualization of it, the below graph on the left-hand side shows the difference between the number of YES votes in the referendum and the number of AKP [ ]
There are a number of striking features of Sunday s referendum in Turkey, which resulted in a narrow victory (51.4% being the official YES vote share at the time of writing this blog post) for the constitutional amendment proposed by the government. There are, however, numerous challenges to the result, both with regards to the environment in [ ]
A central challenge for the Turkish economy in avoiding falling into a middle-income trap is to achievea shift away from (what the World Bank has labeled) a know-who toward a know-how economy. The latter implies not just investments in education but also putting a more educated workforce to productive use. The recently released employment statistics from the [ ]
A curious aspect of the new GDP series (which I ve covered here, here, and here) coming out of Turkey is the divergence between GDP growth and the stock market. Whereas official GDP statistics shows higher growth during the 2010-2015 period than the preceding six years 2004-2009, the opposite is true for the Turkish stock market. This can [ ]
In the previous two posts on Turkey s revised GDP statistics I showed 1) how revised GDP growth numbers diverge from the older version after 2009, 2) the importance of construction investments, and 3) how standard policy variables failed to explain the revised growth figures. Especially the previous post used cross-sectional data to show that global relationships between policy [ ]
The previous post focused the extent to which Turkey s revised GDP data changed the recent history of economic growth in Turkey. A particularly striking fact of the new series is how much higher the growth rate in GDP in Turkey has been ever since the global financial crisis in 2008/2009. Of interest is then also how this [ ]
The Turkish Statistical Institute recently released a revision to its GDP series (here and here), with some noteworthy consequences. Not only did the new series produce an upward revision of the level of GDP by around 20 percent (for GDP in 2015), but equally striking is the upward revision in the real growth rate of GDP after 2009 [ ]
The Turkish Statistical Agency recently published a revised set of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) series, with some rather striking consequences for Turkey s economy. One less covered aspect of the new publication is the accompanying data on province-level GDP for the period 2004-2014. This is a welcome addition to students of Turkey, and I couldn t help taking a [ ]
I am grateful to the feedback on my previous post, whether it has been in public or in private. I think of the V-Dem data as an important contribution to how social scientists can measure institutions, and democracy in particular. I do, however, have some thoughts on the V-Dem data and the main other datasets [ ]