Internet in Turkey: Expensive and banned
Güven Sak, PhD
28 January 2014
Half of Turkey is not on the Internet. The non-urbanized, eastern, and female half, of course. I saw a tweet about a recent legislation which makes it easier to put an administrative ban on the Internet. “I will pay 57 liras a month to connect and you will decide which pages I visit, ha! This must be a joke.” There was truth in this joke, however, as is in all jokes.
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Do global imbalances decline?
27 January 2014
Six years after the start of the global crisis, we are still busy with picking up the pieces of the world economy. Relative growth rates in developed countries, the US to begin with, are expected to recover in 2014; but the world is still performing worse than the pre-crisis period in terms of several parameters. For instance, total employment in the US is 1.3 million less than it was before the crisis, which shows us that it is yet too early to assume that the crisis is all over.
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What’s the problem with coffeehouses and the Internet?
Güven Sak, PhD
25 January 2014
What do coffeehouses and the Internet have in common? Both, believe it or not, are mediums of information exchange. What’s the problem with them? Wherever there is a free flow of information, there is an autocrat trying to suppress “rumors” from spreading. Why do rumors spread? Because there is no free flow of information. If you suppress the main channels of communication, people will create their own little black market for it. Under the Ottoman Empire, it was the coffeehouses of Istanbul where you heard the rumors, and furious autocratic Emperors would lash out against them whenever the mill didn’t strike their fancy. The new Internet legislation the Erdoğan government is sponsoring is no different. When it comes to control over free information exchange, nothing much seems t
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Who chooses and places these things all around Ankara?
Güven Sak, PhD
24 January 2014
After the Gezi Park incident, Istanbul Mayor Kadir Topbaş said, “I won’t even change the location of a bus stop without asking the people.” I think he was right. Have you seen the new clock towers in Ankara? Normally, a city has a single historical clock tower. Big Ben in Westminister, London, for instance, was built in the 1850s. If you think Turkey and England cannot be compared, consider the Izmir Clock Tower. It was built in 1901 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Abdul Hamid II's accession to the throne. It is literally historical. These are genuine buildings with historical significance. Ankara, however, has one clock tower on almost each street nowadays. When I look at them, I see plastic-like things in awkward shapes and colors. They look like fake historical clock towers. I
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The small grocery stores are still standing
Güven Sak, PhD
21 January 2014
The meaning of the grocery business is changing; as is every other form of business. The “small grocery stores against supermarkets” story has caught on. The state-sponsored advertorials recently have had this grocer thing going on. I guess we all pretend to like the grocers in our neighborhood. We want them to survive, but for some reason we go to supermarkets instead to do our shopping. So, the small grocers are falling into financial distress. This should be the case. Otherwise, there is no point in the commercials.
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Does low interest rate actually boost growth?
Fatih Özatay, PhD
18 January 2014
The responsibility of these does not fall exclusively on the Central Bank. It would be extremely unfair to claim so; but so would to ignore the role of monetary policy in this picture. Such comments are quite popular at news channels nowadays: “The Central Bank refrains from raising interest rates for such step might constrain growth.” This interest rate issue is getting increasingly interesting, so that we are almost going to divide into camps. The question is, whether or not the Central Bank can boost GDP growth by keeping interests rates low. Before answering this question, we have to think on another one: “Why doesn’t the Central Bank cut the interest rate down to zero for furthering GDP growth?” There are three versions of the answer here. Actually the answer is quite clear: if you d
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Why Turkey is so predominantly urban, male and western
Güven Sak, PhD
18 January 2014
The Turkish Statistical Institution released a survey late last year showing the country’s internet population is predominantly urban, male and western. 51% of the population has no access to the net. For women, this increases to 61%. Go to the east of Ankara and that number rises to around 70%. As you move from Istanbul down to the country’s south-eastern corner of Hakkari, connectivity to the internet declines. It overlaps nicely with national export figures, especially with those to the more sophisticated European market. The Customs Union with the EU is also predominantly an urban, male and western preoccupation. Let’s get into some detail.In the case of the export business, Turkey’s industrial hubs are around organized industrial estates (OIE) established in urban centers. Wh
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Cities need a higher share of the Gezi Park community
Güven Sak, PhD
17 January 2014
The current size of the creative class should be improved. Each city should have a higher share of the Gezi Park community. Otherwise, there will be no prosperity. The Gezi Park incident started at the end of May 2013. The park in Taksim was about to fall victim to a profit distribution operation, the kind to which we were accustomed. Then something unaccustomed happened. People began to protest the project and said, “leave this park as it is.” We were not used to taking to the streets for such things. But these people did things like chain themselves to trees. Their response belonged to the twenty-first century. Our administrators, who still live in the first half of the previous century, had difficulty understanding what was going on. It was the first time the routine of politics in Tu
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Some observations about the labor market
Fatih Özatay, PhD
16 January 2014
What would the unemployment rate be if labor force participation rate sharply surged to a level close to that in the troubled countries of Europe? Yesterday labor market statistics for October were released. As you might remember, following the global crisis, unemployment rate had reached as high as 15 percent (please note that I will refer to seasonally adjusted figures throughout the article). The rate started declining gradually after April 2009 and hit the lowest level since 2005 in June 2012, with 8.5 percent. This was perfect news as the unemployment rate seemed to be rigid around 10 percent from January 2005 to the global financial crisis.
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It all started in 2010
Güven Sak, PhD
14 January 2014
Countries which become more unbalanced in an age of declining global imbalances are called vulnerable. It was quite some time ago, in the first years of the twenty-first century, at a meeting in Rome on global imbalances. Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state of the US, was in attendance. The popular question was how long the Chinese would continue to finance the high current account deficit of the US. There was an infirm balance, which was not sustainable. A financial crisis in the US was inevitable. It was a casual, brain-storming event where the mavens of the issue discussed prospects and possibilities.
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