Weekly Turkey Summary and what’s-ahead
Here’s my take on some recent developments, including addenda to previous posts, as well as what is coming. Note that this is not supposed to be a complete list, just my impressions on what I deem are important.
First, a Turkey economist, in a follow-up to my post on the Central Bank’s new seasonally-adjusted real sector confidence index, or SARSCI, sent me the link of a CBT paper from 2006 explaining the index. She has found the following excerpt from the paper that pretty much answers my question on justifying the use of seasoanlly-adjusting RSCI.
“……Consequently, no standardization and smoothing seem to be necessary. Even though seasonal influences are found to be present in some of the indices, the series are not seasonally adjusted for the sake of simplicity. “
Granted, the paper is from 2006, but all I was asking for was a similar paper before SARSCI was released, one that would justify the use of seasonal adjustment.
Second, as an addendum to Thursday’s politics piece, there is an article in today’s Turkish daily Milliyet that claims that only one CHP MP will take the oath at tomorrow’s ceremony. The lone ranger, according to the article, is former columnist Oktay Eksi, who, as the oldest MP, will preside over the Parliament until Speaker of the Parliament is chosen.
As for this week, the important data releases are first quarter GDP/growth (National Income Accounts) and May Trade Balance, both on the last day of the month, i.e. Thursday. I expect a yoy growth in double digits or slightly short of double-digit territory. As for trade balance, you can get a pretty accurate forecast of exports from the Turkish Exporters Association figures…
…which are pointing to an exports figure of USD 11bn for May.
As for imports, you can use VAT on imports to forecast imports…
… which show imports at around USD 21bn. But VAT on imports is a much less reliable forecasting tool than TEA exports data, so any errors of my trade deficit forecats of USD 10bn will probably come from the import side.
There is also Istanbul Chamber of Commerce Istanbul inflation data and news channel CNBC-e’s consumer confidence indices on Friday… Of course, as part of Froday’s PMI/ISM releases, we’ll have the Turkish PMIs as well…
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