Suchergebnisse

The Neoliberal Landscape is a collection of nine essays exploring the economic, political, social, and historical dynamics behind the rise of Islamic political parties in the Middle East, particularly the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) in Turkey. For scholars studying Turkey and the wider Middle East, understanding the rise of the AKP as well as its internal and external undercurrents has been a challenge. On the one hand, its founding leaders marketed their party as a democratic Islamic party, similar to Christian Democrats in Europe, and claimed to focus their efforts on democratizing Turkey by limiting the military and Kemalist hegemony. To this end, they formed alliances with the liberals and the liberal-left as well as the outward oriented business groups, and used the support of the European Union and the United States as leverage to increase their legitimacy. The AKP's strong neoliberal stance in economic policy also allowed it to win over domestic and international capital to its side. The changing times in global politics were also in the AKP's favor, coinciding with the post-9/11 period when the United States and its allies were desperate to find a liberal and democratic Muslim country with a market economy that they could use as a showcase. The AKP project, however, proved to be short-lived as it has increasingly become authoritarian at home, bordering on neo-fascist, and confrontational abroad. In fact, many analysts have suggested that what Turkey is experiencing is nothing short of a regime change, moving the country from a secular republic, albeit a semi-democratic one, to a neo-fascist one-party state with some Islamic flavor, ruled by a strong-man with no pretense of democracy. In fact, since the 7 June 2015 elections, the country has moved to a de facto presidential system, even without constitutional change.

Using microlevel company panel data, the article analyzes the impacts of financial liberalization on real investment behavior under capital market imperfections, volatile macroprices, and changing country risk levels. The findings suggest that financial liberalization in developing countries has become instrumental in channeling real sector savings to speculative short-term investments instead of long-term investment projects and hence altering the pattern of capital accumulation in the real sectors of the economy.

The risks and benefits of financial liberalization is a highly contentious issue in the current economic debate. This article focuses on Turkey's "lost decades" and tries to reveal the underlying factors behind the economic collapse in the country. Two elements will be analyzed: (a) the role of public sector together with the domestic banking sector in setting the stage for alternating financial crisis, and (b) the effect of close correlation between external debt and capital flight on the economy. This paper argues that there exists a contemporaneous bi-directional causality between external debt and capital flight in the Turkish economy. Exploration of this fact may have some important implications for economic policy modeling in Turkey's crisis-ridden economy. (DSE/DÜI)

This book examines the rise of South-South economic relations while including a historical, theoretical, and empirical examination that attempts to both place current South-South relations within their historical trajectory and examine in what ways current South-South relations differ from previous attempts such as 'new-regionalism'.