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Turkey initiated its long process of integration with the world commodity and financial markets in 1980, and the successive stages of liberalization have been surveyed and are overviewed here. Since its early inception, the Turkish adjustment program was hailed as a model by the orthodox international community, and was supported by generous structural adjustment loans, debt relief, and technical aid; currently, the Turkish economy can be said to be operating under conditions of a truly open and liberalized economy, and in this setting, many of the instruments of macro and fiscal control have been transformed, and the constraints of macroequilibrium have undergone major structural change. The analytics of the two distinct phases of liberalization (1980–8 and 1989–98) is the theme of the first section of this chapter, where the modes of accumulation and surplus creation under both subperiods are addressed separately; the second section carries this analysis to microaspects of adjustment and reports on the evolving patterns of employment, labor productivity, and overall informalization of the labor force. Responses to pressures of international competitiveness and the emerging patterns of income distribution are studied in the third section, and in the fourth section, the preceding analysis is applied to size distribution of income and the incidence of postliberalization adjustments on poverty. The incidence of globalization on public sector accounts and the state's changing role in the provision of public goods are narrated in the fifth section, and the sixth concludes with an overview of the social policy implications of globalization.

The Turkish structural adjustment since 1980 has been associated with chronic instability. Since the late 1980s, the weaknesses in the fiscal system and the premature external liberalization emerge as the main factors hindering the passage toward stable growth. Enforced and erratic distributional changes and relative stagnation of capital accumulation have undermined the growth potential of the economy. Further, it is demonstrated that existing market structures may negate environmental policies based on market incentives. These observations, as well as those on the interactions of the market system and the environment, create strong arguments in favor of an active state

This chapter examines the facts and processes characterizing the dynamic macroeconomic adjustments in Turkey since the start of its reforms toward global integration. The study is organized as follows. Section 2 focuses on the analytics of macro adjustments of the two distinct (i.e., 1980-1988/1989 and 1989-2000) phases of liberalization. Section 3 quantifies the macro adjustments via a set of decomposition exercises and traces the evolution of real output and sources of aggregate demand. Microlevel adjustments and related decomposition exercises, in turn, are investigated in Section 4 for the manufacturing sector. The distributional effects of liberalization of commodity trade and finance are summarized in Section 5, and Section 6 gives a conclusion.

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