Turkish Exports Before and After the 2001 Financial Crisis: A Panel Gravity Model

Turkey was subjected to a number of financial shocks after the liberalisation movements in the 1980s. The most devastating of them was the consecutive political and financial crises in late 2000 and early 2001. The absence of political stability and depreciated Turkish Lira devastated the markets. The Turkish government immediately acted against the collapsed economic system and introduced a radical Economic Stability Programme under the supervision of Kemal Dervis¸. The programme has restructured the banking and financial system and improved economic discipline. In this study, we aim to investigate the impacts of the 2001 crisis and the structural changes on Turkish exports. To this end, we estimate a one-way gravity model, using panel data belonging to Turkish exports to 135 World Trade Organization (WTO) member countries, over the period between 1981 and 2015. The augmented model controls for the inter/intra-industry exports, competitiveness, trade agreements, trade unions and additional demographics. We utilised Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood (PPML) estimator to account for unobservable time-invariant effects, zero trade, possible heteroscedasticity, and cross-correlation. The results reveals that Turkey has become a free market economy after the liberalisation movements in the early 1980s, and its exports are determined by the same indicators that affect other similar economies; on the other hand, the 2001 crisis has an immediate positive effect on exports through weak Turkish Lira, but this effect turns to negative in the following year. In addition, we find that structural changes in the economic system has a significant effect on exports and help to mitigate the trade-distorting effects of the global financial crisis in 2008. JEL Codes: C33, F13, F14