The ‘Ankara Moment’: the politics of Turkey’s regional power in the Middle East, 2007–11

Around 2007 Turkey became a regional power in the Middle East, a status it has maintained at least until the outset of the Arab Revolt in 2011. To understand why Turkey only became a regional power under the Muslim akp government and why this happened at the specific point in time that it did, this article highlights the self-reinforcing dynamics between Turkey’s domestic political-economic transformation in the first decade of this century and the advantageous regional developments in the Middle East at the same time. It holds that this specific linkage—the ‘Ankara Moment’—and its regional resonance in the neighbouring Middle East carries more transformative potential than the ‘Washington Consensus’ or the ‘Beijing Consensus’ so prominently discussed in current global South politics.     

On the asymmetric effects of exchange rate changes on domestic production in Turkey

A few studies in the literature have used linear models to assess the impact of changes in the value of lira on Turkish domestic production. They have found no significant long-run effects. In this paper we separate lira appreciations from depreciations and engage in asymmetry analysis. Since the procedure requires using nonlinear models, we rely upon Shin et al.’s (Festschrift in honor of Peter Schmidt: econometric methods and applications. Springer, New York, pp 281–314, 2014) nonlinear ARDL approach and discover that indeed, the effects of changes in the real effective value of lira have asymmetric effects, both in the short run as well as in the long run. Indeed, in the long run we find that both lira depreciation and lira appreciation to have expansionary effects on domestic production in Turkey.