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.