Gendered Nature and Urban Culture: The Dialectics of Gated Developments in Izmir,Turkey

This article adds to recent debates on the emergence of new forms of private gated developments in Turkey that specifically target the upper middle classes. In particular, it focuses on the rise of residential gated developments along the Izmir‐Ce?me expressway to highlight how the dialectics between gender, nature and culture are reinforced in these places. The article, based on a case study of three gated developments in this region, suggests that their production is made possible through a series of dualisms between nature and culture, mobility and fixity, urban public life and gendered domesticity, urban modernity and rural parochialism, polluted city and healthy town. Based on interviews with architects, developers and residents, as well as local‐authority officials in Urla town who sanction these developments, this article argues that contradictions between different sets of dualisms form a central aspect of the processes through which these developments were designed, produced, marketed and inhabited. Taken collectively, these contradictions point broadly to the limits of gated communities in creating stable, adaptable and sustainable patterns of development in Turkey and the global South.     

Accounting in Turkey

Turkey is a developing country in the Middle East, and is attracting an increasing number of foreign investments and joint ventures. However, the Turkish accounting system is not one of the topics that is studied in detail, the language barrier perhaps being the main reason. As the amount of foreign investment and the number of joint ventures increase and the Turkish stock market develops, a new responsibility will fall on accountants to disclose and discuss the current accounting system in Turkey. This paper attempts to fill this gap by describing the current accounting system and state of the profession in Turkey.     

Forecasting elections in Turkey

This paper proposes a model for forecasting elections in Turkey. In doing so, this study is based on three theoretical premises: first, that the voters reward or punish parties according to their performances relative to the macroeconomic conditions; second, that the popularity of the political parties in Turkey are closely connected to their performances in local elections; and third, that the centre-periphery distinction affects the fortunes of the political parties in Turkey. The contribution of this analysis is the introduction of an explicit model on which can forecast the impact of economic and political variables on the elections in Turkey by using reliable, public and macro level data. Our findings show that the dynamics of the evaluation of political parties in Turkey follow a similar pattern to those of contemporary democracies, being driven by both economic and political factors.

“…why did AKP win? There cannot be a scientific and sociological explanation of this.”Özdemir ?nce, 17 August 2007, Hürriyet, emphasis added.

     

Workers' Companies in Turkey

In a free market employees can become owners of their firms. Diana Spearman shows how Turkish workers have pioneered the creation of new worker-controlled companies as an even better way of worker participation than the share-ownership favoured in Britain.     

Starting-up unregistered and firm performance in Turkey

Recent years have seen a questioning of the negative representation of informal sector entrepreneurship and an emergent view that it may offer significant benefits. This paper advances this rethinking by evaluating the relationship between business registration and future firm performance. Until now, the assumption has been that starting-up unregistered is linked to weaker firm performance. Using World Bank Enterprise Survey data on 2494 formal enterprises in Turkey, and controlling for other determinants of firm performance as well as the endogeneity of the registration decision, the finding is that formal enterprises that started-up unregistered and spent longer unregistered have significantly higher subsequent annual sales and productivity growth rates compared with those registered from the outset. This is argued to be because in such weak institutional environments, the advantages of registering from the outset are outweighed by the benefits of deferring business registration and the low risks of detection and punishment. The resultant implication is that there is a need to shift away from the conventional eradication approach based on the negative depiction of informal entrepreneurship as poorly performing, and towards a more facilitating approach that improves the benefits of business registration and tackles the systemic formal institutional deficiencies that lead entrepreneurs to decide to delay the registration of their ventures.     

Global risks and tourism industry in Turkey

Quality & Quantity - This study applies the World Economic Forum’s global risk report methodology at a country and industry specific level to understand how the national as well as the...     

Economic reforms and income distribution in Turkey

The aim of this paper is, first, to find out the income sources of the improvement in income inequality in the reform period between 2002 and 2007. s, we aim to assess the distributional impacts of macroeconomic policies over the 2002–2007 reform period by examining the contributions of different income groups to overall inequality. Income data obtained from the Household Budget Surveys of TurkStat covering the 2002–2013 period are used. The results show that there have been significant improvements in the income distribution after 2002. The extent of this improvement seems to have been higher during the 2002–2007 reform period than for the rest of the period after 2007. Entrepreneurial and financial income groups were the most distinctive for this improvement. The results also indicate that the contribution of transfer payments was very small, but surprisingly positive in both the 2002–2007 and 2007–2009 periods, and expectedly negative in the 2009–2013 period.     

Banking crises and financial system in Turkey

The important part of the macroeconomic policies is related to financial sector. Banking, which is a portion of this sector, takes the most important place in both the operation of economic system and the realization of the institutional or individual activities. It is well known that the foundation of banking system is based on trust, stability and strong capital formation. The birth and development of the banking sector in Turkey is relatively new. If the roots of the Turkish banking are traced, it is seen that the history goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Since the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, the targets of the economic development have been tried to be reached through supporting the industry and banking in the leadership of the State. But the obstacles in the financial system have limited the development of the Turkish banking sector. Since the application of the liberalization policies in the markets, particularly after 1980＇s, the banking sector has been one of the most affected sectors from the liberalization. When the fundamental problems of the Turkish banking sector have been analyzed, they can be enumerated as economic instability, being the financier of the public deficits, being too sensitive to the market risks and being fragile, high input costs, inefficient use of capital, defects in the booking system or weaknesses in the control, problems with restructuring, defects in domestic control, lack of risk management and institutional inner-management. In this study, the development of banking sector will be briefly analyzed for determined periods since 1923. The analysis will include the developments which create economic crises, the role of banks in this process, the defects of the banking sector and the financial system, and the effects of crises on the banking sector on the basis of the cause and effect relation. Economic crisis of February 2001 and the banking crisis will be examined in detail. The new arrangements after the 2001 crisis in the banking sector have been overviewed.     

Consistency of assessments in infinite signaling games

In this paper we investigate possible ways to define consistency of assessments in infinite signaling games, i.e. signaling games in which the sets of types, messages and answers are complete, separable metric spaces. Roughly speaking, a consistency concept is called appropriate if it implies Bayesian consistency and copies the original idea of consistency in finite extensive form games as introduced by ^{Kreps and Wilson (Econometrica 1982, 50, 863–894)}. We present a particular appropriate consistency concept, which we call strong consistency and give a characterization of strongly consistent assessments. It turns out that all appropriate consistency concepts are refinements of strong consistency. Finally, we define and characterize structurally consistent assessments in infinite signaling games.     

人居环境及其生态线索研究

以生态思想为线索,通过评述人居环境及人居环境研究的发展历程,重点分析了有关人居环境研究方面的代表性观点.认为人居环境的发展深受人地关系认识的影响,对人地关系的认识经历了"环境决定-技术对抗-调节-和谐-可持续发展"的追求过程;中国特色风水理论具有生态美学内涵,对建筑和人居环境有积极影响;人居环境科学是大科学时代的产物,需要区域的视角、综合的思想、生态的理念、人文的精神、自然的设计、可持续发展的目标,需要各领域的学者多层次、多途径的努力与合作.     

Impact of Karl Pearson's Work on Statistical Developments in India

Karl Pearson's work greatly inspired P. C. Mahalanobis's interest in statistics, who was at the centre of modern statistical developments in India. Mahalanobis learned statistics on his own, reading Pearson's articles and his journal, and encouraged others to study Pearson's papers. Pearson was a Honorary Fellow of the Indian Statistical Institute, which has been a leading statistical training and research center in India. The statistical revolution that Pearson brought also facilitated the training and research of many Indian statisticians.     

2008 financial crisis and income distribution in Turkey

Quality & Quantity - This study provides some new evidence for the 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis on income inequality in Turkey. Two methodologies were used in the study. The first...     

Some Recent Developments in Futures Hedging

The use of futures contracts as a hedging instrument has been the focus of much research. At the theoretical level, an optimal hedge strategy is traditionally based on the expected–utility maximization paradigm. A simplification of this paradigm leads to the minimum–variance criterion. Although this paradigm is quite well accepted, alternative approaches have been sought. At the empirical level, research on futures hedging has benefited from the recent developments in the econometrics literature. Much research has been done on improving the estimation of the optimal hedge ratio. As more is known about the statistical properties of financial time series, more sophisticated estimation methods are proposed. In this survey we review some recent developments in futures hedging. We delineate the theoretical underpinning of various methods and discuss the econometric implementation of the methods.     

Small Area Estimation-New Developments and Directions

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical review of the main advances in small area estimation (SAE) methods in recent years. We also discuss some of the earlier developments, which serve as a necessary background for the new studies. The review focuses on model dependent methods with special emphasis on point prediction of the target area quantities, and mean square error assessments. The new models considered are models used for discrete measurements, time series models and models that arise under informative sampling. The possible gains from modeling the correlations among small area random effects used to represent the unexplained variation of the small area target quantities are examined. For review and appraisal of the earlier methods used for SAE, see Ghosh & Rao (1994).