Political Business Cycle on the Agricultural Supports in Turkey

Abstract

This study investigates whether there is a political business cycle (PBC) on the agricultural supports in the Turkish economy. In this respect, we investigate the policies of different Turkish governments for the agricultural supports measured by the producer support estimates for the period 1986-2011. To this end, first the series for the producer support estimates are filtered by the Hodrick-Prescott filter, and then an econometric model is employed to estimate the effects of a set of explanatory variables including the economic crisis, the opportunistic and the partisan characteristics of the incumbent parties. Our results provide limited support for the opportunistic type PBC. Moreover, it seems that some Turkish governments have created the partisanship type PBCs.