Summary

Considering the importance attributed to the economic structural reforms in the current conjuncture of the global economy, the research project to be carried out on the Turkish economy in the position of developing countries focuses on economic structural reforms and their impact on the economic growth. In this context, the aim of the research project is to create economic structural reform (ESR) indicators the first time for Turkey on the basis of national sources in the period of 1990-2020, based on the number of reform proposals directly implemented in the financial, fiscal, real and trade sectors within a specific scope, taking into account the development of international literature on defining and measuring economic structural reforms, and is to examine the effects of these indicators on Turkey's economic growth performance in the period of 1990-2020 from an empirical point of view in real and potential dimensions.

In the first phase of the project for the determined purpose, the ESR’s in relevant sectors will be redefined and codified taking the definitions and encodings in the IMF-MONA (Monitoring of Fund Arrangements) database, and on the reforms of Turkey's economy, legal framework, institutional structure and the functioning of markets. In the second stage, the number of these the ESR’s will be separately determined by scanning the 1990-2020 period in the range of daily archive of the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey the Official Newspaper (RTON) which is a national and open access resource and based on the number of the ESR proposals implemented in the relevant areas. In the third stage, the ESR indicators in Turkey's 1990-2020 period will be normalized with the statistical approaches such as Z-Score (ZS) and Min-Max (MM), and recalculated in index format using data on a yearly basis of the numbers of these the ESR proposals. In the final stage, the effects of the ESR indicators on Turkey's economic growth performance (real and potential growth) in the period of 1990-2020 will be empirically examined using the linear and/or nonlinear methods within the scope of time series analysis, based on econometric models created by expanding the Cobb-Douglas (CD) production function.

In the first 3 months of the research project, which is planned to be completed in twenty-four (24) months, the ESRs in the financial, fiscal, real and trade sectors in Turkey are aimed to identify and codify by the lead applicant and researcher. Between the 4^th and 15^th months, it is aimed to scan and calculate the number of the defined and encoded ESRs by the lead applicant and scholar of the project in Turkey according to the sectors they are related to for the period of 1990-2020 on the basis of the RTON archive data and the number of the reform proposals implemented directly. Between the 16^th and 20^th months, it is planned to convert by obtaining the econometric model variables defined in the research by the lead applicant and researcher to examine the effects of the ESR’s on Turkey's economic growth performance, and to perform the analysis and estimation of the models. Between the 21^th and 24^th months, the interpretation of the - findings and development of policy recommendations based on the findings are planned by the lead applicant and the researchers.

The research project seeks answers to the questions about how often and to what extent the ESR was performed in the financial, fiscal, real and trade sectors in Turkey during the period of 1990-2020, and whether the ESRs had  a statistically significant impact on Turkey's real and potential economic growth.