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Searching for Opportunistic Political Business Cycles in Turkey

Asutay, Mehmet

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Authors

Mehmet Asutay



Abstract

The literature on political business cycles (PBC) suggests that incumbent governments manipulate the economy for political reasons, in particular for winning elections. Accordingly, it is argued that incumbent governments manipulate the economy to create better economic conditions in the pre-election period with declining unemployment and increasing growth rates of the economy and inflation to enhance the likelihood of reelection. The theory suggests that post-election periods experience contraction in the economy to offset the adverse impact of expansionary policy in the pre-election period. The main argument is that due to the myopic nature of individual voters and their retrospective voting attitudes, governments can manipulate the economy to create such conditions to increase their popularity. The theoretical model of this opportunistic PBC is based on Nordhaus theoretic (1975). This study aims to investigate the existence of PBC in Turkey by modelling fiscal and monetary policy instruments within traditional opportunistic Nordhausian theoretic. The econometric analysis is based on Nordhaus theoretic with exogenously determined elections. The fiscal and monetary policy instruments are modelled within intervention analysis with quarterly data for the 1980-2002 and 1986-2002 periods. The econometric time-series analysis provided unequivocally strong evidence for the presence of PBC in fiscal and monetary policy instruments in Turkey. In light of the evidence yielded, the presence of politically-manufactured fiscal and monetary policy cycles has been established in the case of Turkey (mainly) in the period 1980-2002. This implies that incumbent governments in Turkey have used elections to create PBC in their attempts to buy votes for winning elections or to enhance their chances of re-election. The research, hence, vindicates the Nordhausian theoretic or model in the case of a developing country, namely in Turkey.

Citation

Asutay, M. (2004). Searching for Opportunistic Political Business Cycles in Turkey.

Conference Name 24th Annual Conference of the Public Choice Society
Conference Location Berlin
Start Date Apr 15, 2004
End Date Apr 18, 2004
Publication Date 2004-04
Deposit Date Jun 24, 2008
Publicly Available Date Jun 24, 2008
Keywords Political business cycles, Nordhaus model, Elections, Fiscal and monetary policies, Autoregression analysis, Time series analysis.
Publisher URL http://www.diw.de/deutsch/epcs/32788.html
Additional Information Conference dates: April 15-18, 2004.

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