Fragmentation in Urban Movements: The Role of Urban Planning Processes

Urban plans and projects that aim to initiate the redevelopment and gentrification of urban areas create social and ecological pressures on urban environments and thereby stimulate urban movements. These movements have a lifespan, which evolves in interaction with planning authorities under local or central governments and may be marked by institutionalization and co‐optation, as well as fragmentation among the people involved in them. Fragmentations are usually based on conflicting individual and collective interests, but may also be the result of different political perspectives in groups. This article is based on a case study conducted in two adjacent gecekondu neighbourhoods of Istanbul, Gülsuyu and Gülensu, where urban politics have played an important role in efforts to resist plans for urban transformation. It shows that fragmentations are very likely to occur in urban movements during planning processes in a neoliberal era, owing to the different perspectives in the movement on what the just city is.     

Internationalisation,growth and pay inequality: a cointegration analysis for Turkey, 1970–2007

The nature of the internationalisation-growth-inequality nexus is very complex; and therefore, not surprisingly, there is no consensus on whether increasing openness to trade leads to higher inequality or not – in fact, there is even no full understanding on the impact of the openness on the economic growth. In the case of Turkey it is observed that there is relatively little empirical work that addresses the issue of inequality. Considering this fact, the study aims to provide some more evidence on the complex relationship between trade openness, foreign direct investment, economic growth and pay inequality by utilising a combination of different Theil Indices of pay inequality. The paper utilises the Johansen Cointegration and Granger Causality methods. Our findings yield that higher economic growth resulting from trade openness comes with higher pay inequality.     

Sticky Information Phillips Curves: European Evidence

We estimate the Sticky Information Phillips Curve model of Mankiw and Reis (2002) using survey expectations of professional forecasters from four major European economies. Our estimates imply that inflation expectations in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are updated about once a year, while in Italy, about once each 6 months.     

Monetary transmission with multiple policy rates: evidence from Turkey

Quantitative easing policies have led to persistent divergence between officially announced policy rates and short-term money market rates in many economies, making it challenging to assess the stance of monetary policy in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Lack of data variation in short-term interest rates across time dimension has made it difficult to identify the monetary transmission mechanisms. In order to shed some light on this topic, we make advantage of a specific period from Turkey during which the central bank deliberately allowed the policy rates to diverge frequently from the interbank rates due to capital flow management purposes. Using bank-level flow data from this episode, we investigate the relationship between various short-term interest rate measures and bank loan/deposit rates through panel estimation methods. Our findings suggest that interbank rates are more relevant than central bank’s officially announced rates for the transmission of monetary policy when the two diverge from each other persistently. Interbank rates particularly play a key role in the pricing of loans and deposits. These findings provide helpful guidance for evaluating the monetary stance under unconventional policies.     

Business process management in hotels: with a focus on delivering quality guest service

Quality & Quantity - In this study business process management as a tool of improvement service quality is introduced and it is examined that how it can be used to improve service quality in...     

Tradable and non-tradable expenditure and aggregate demand for imports in an emerging market economy

Using an assumption of non-separability of non-tradable expenditure from imports, this paper examines the impact of the structural transformation undertaken after 2001 on imports and, in turn, the current account stance of Turkey. In this regard, an import demand function is derived under the assumption of non-separability, and is estimated using quarterly time series data from Turkey. The empirical results show that the assumption of non-separability cannot be rejected in the case of Turkey and the relative prices of non-tradable and tradable goods must be among the determinants of import demand in addition to the relative price of imports and real GDP. This result accordingly implies that recent increases in import expenditure are, to some extent, due to changes in the relative price structure in favour of non-tradable goods.     

Nonuniform Staggered Prices and Output Persistence

Staggered prices are a fundamental building block of New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. In the standard model, prices are uniformly staggered, but recent empirical evidence suggests that deviations from uniform staggering are common. This paper analyzes how synchronization of price changes affects the response to monetary policy shocks. I find that even large deviations from uniform staggering have small effects on the response of output. Aggregate dynamics in a model of uniform staggering may serve well as an approximation to a more complicated model with some degree of synchronization in price setting.     

Do Low Wages Stimulate Investment? An analysis of the relationship between distribution and investment in Turkish private manufacturing industry

This study analyses the relative impact of profitability and demand on accumulation in Turkish private manufacturing industry on the basis of the theoretical framework outlined by Marglin & Bhaduri (1990). The main motivation behind this analysis is to shed light on the demand aspects of the slowdown in accumulation in the manufacturing industry despite the increase in profitability during the structural adjustment episode. For this purpose, the ratio of investment to value-added is estimated as a function of the profit share and an accelerator term, namely the growth rate of value-added, using panel data for the 26 industries of the private manufacturing sector. The results show that investment is not responsive to the profit share, whereas growth has a consistent positive impact. This result is significant in explaining the inability of pro-capital income policies to stimulate manufacturing investments throughout the export-promotion era. The export boom maintained by the use of the existing capacity rather than by new investments shows the limits of export demand to compensate for the fall in domestic consumption out of wages. The results make a strong case against the argument that profitability enhances accumulation. Evidence shows that it is not possible to enhance accumulation and long-term potential for growth simply based on promoting profitability, without paying attention to the demand aspects.     

Hidden Overhang of Domestic Debt and Its Role in the This-Time-Is-Different Syndrome: An Empirical Contingent Liabilities Model

The recent studies in public finance literature open an exciting research area on hidden overhang of domestic public debt and creative accounting. In this study, I identify hidden public debts in Turkey. I then develop a dynamical model that takes as given the stock of contingent liabilities generated by lending/borrowing relationships among public entities and looks for the debt (in)tolerance of government to liquidate it in finite periods. Last, I introduce a general empirical methodology to analyze the role of overborrowing in the this-time-is-different syndrome and test model outcome against data for hidden debts in Turkey's postliberalization period (1989-2010).