Economic Growth and Structural Change in Turkey 1960–88

Abstract

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.