Turkish Economy at the Crossroads: Facing the Challenges Ahead is an exciting new volume of articles from prominent experts, edited by two distinguished economists. Despite its international stature and its diversified open-market economy, the global literature on Turkey is dispersed and sparse. The book aims to remedy this shortcoming by providing readers interested in Turkey with a balanced and up-to-date overview of the economy.Topics discussed include trends in long-term political economy, post-2001 macroeconomic policies, tradable and non-tradable sectors and their impact on income distribution, capital flows and financial imbalances, success and problems of structural transformation at the micro level, characteristics of the labor markets with special emphasis on female employment, Turkey's long lasting but difficult relations with the European Union and possible scenarios for the near future. This unified approach permits to highlight and tackle effectively the challenges and risks Turkey faces in the final and critical stage of transition to a modern developed society.

Adopting a political-economy perspective, this book is an original collection of research chapters that focus on Turkey’s economic-development experience from the nineteenth century to the present. It provides a systematic and chronological examination of Turkey’s major historical dynamics in the economic and socio-political spheres. The chapters are organized according to the consecutive phases of Turkey’s political-economic development. Each chapter not only reflects on the country-specific aspects of those development phases, but also clarifies the dependence of domestic-policy orientations on the dynamics of the world economy. As such, the book provides a historically-conscious, political-economic account of Turkey’s dependent-development experience. The book serves as a quality reference on the political economy of modern Turkey, bringing together fourteen prominent experts as contributing authors who have devoted their intellectual lives to the understanding and explanation of political-economic dynamics in both Turkey and the world. All contributors write on a historical period of the Turkish economy in which they are most specialized. This aspect of the book is a momentous advantage in the field of Turkey's political economy, enabling the highest degree of academic expertise to concentrate in each chapter.

The first comprehensive history of the Turkish economy The population and economy of the area within the present-day borders of Turkey has consistently been among the largest in the developing world, yet there has been no authoritative economic history of Turkey until now. In Uneven Centuries, Şevket Pamuk examines the economic growth and human development of Turkey over the past two hundred years. Taking a comparative global perspective, Pamuk investigates Turkey’s economic history through four periods: the open economy during the nineteenth-century Ottoman era, the transition from empire to nation-state that spanned the two world wars and the Great Depression, the continued protectionism and import-substituting industrialization after World War II, and the neoliberal policies and the opening of the economy after 1980. Making use of indices of GDP per capita, trade, wages, health, and education, Pamuk argues that Turkey’s long-term economic trends cannot be explained only by immediate causes such as economic policies, rates of investment, productivity growth, and structural change. Uneven Centuries offers a deeper analysis of the essential forces underlying Turkey’s development—its institutions and their evolution—to make better sense of the country’s unique history and to provide important insights into the patterns of growth in developing countries during the past two centuries.

Leading writer Boris Kagarlitsky offers an ambitious account of 1000 years of Russian history.

The topics include areas related to macroeconomics and monetary economics (inflation expectations, determinants of monetary policy), labor economics (earning differences, overeducation in labor markets), health economics (adult obesity), tourism economics (tourism response to disruptive events) and energy economics (solar energy systems).

Since the 1950s, the Turkish economy has periodically been facing crises. Decisions taken after crisis do not only have economic effects, but also social, political and diplomatic consequences. For the country, total independence was considered the main principle; economic independence was one of the substantial criteria of that principle, and economic policies were based on it. In this book, the economic independency level at which governments can take independent decisions is defined in terms of macroeconomic variables, on which the proposed model is based and developed. The book aims to analyse the economic policies of Turkey, from an economic dependency perspective; identify the macroeconomic variables affecting economic dependency; and develop an alternative economic policy, taking all of these points into consideration. Therefore, in order to structure the proposed model and to define policies, it is crucial to discuss economic policies, particularly in the post-1980 world; their consequences and impacts on Turkey; crises and the main variables under which they occurred; and to compare the economic policies of the Republic period and their consequences as well. The book intends to develop an independent economic structure so that Turkey can act in her own interests.

Turkey stands at a crossroad after a decade of adjustment to its severe debt crisis in the late 1970s. This volume brings together a group of contributors who discuss the consequences of this transition and the likely pains for the future.