Archive for March, 2011

• Turkey: The (hi)King’s Speech

  Emre Deliveli March 31st, 2011

  If you were to believe the papers and analyst reports, the Central Bank of Turkey’s, or CBT’s, required reserve ratio, or RRR, hikes at last Wednesday’s rate-setting meeting were a complete surprise.

  That may as well be the case, but it would reflect markets’ herd behavior more than anything else. For some reason, markets took CBT Governor Durmuş Yılmaz’s March 15 speech to, or rather interview with, the Wall Street Journal as irrefutable evidence that the Bank would stay on hold this month.

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• Life, Debt and Death in Turkey

  Emre Deliveli March 23rd, 2011

  The Turkish Statistical Institute’s grave-faced bureaucrats count everything, know everything.

  And not only macro data that regularly find their way into your friendly neighborhood economist’s columns. For example, how many eggs were produced last month? 1.09 billion. How many books were published last year? 34,857. And how many telegraphs were sent abroad in 2008? Just one – and one telegraph was received from abroad.

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• A Turkish Woman Scorned

  Emre Deliveli March 8th, 2011

  The Turkish Statistical Institute’s 2010 Labor Force Statistics, which were released last Tuesday, paint the well-known, but still dire, picture of female employment.

  

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• A Phantom MENAce to Turkey

  Emre Deliveli March 3rd, 2011

  With winds of change blowing in the Middle East and North Africa, or MENA, the Turkish media has focused on the impact of the turmoil on the domestic economy.

  With all attention on Libya, the magic number is $15 billion. That’s the total value of the projects undertaken by Turkish companies in Libya during the last four years. Although the outstanding bills from these projects are not available, revenues from construction services abroad amounted to $1 billion last year.

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