This book is composed of original essays that focus on political and institutional aspects of Turkey's 1980-90 stabilization and liberalization experience. Its primary purpose is to trace the complexities and dynamics of Turkey's unique economic and policy environments and, by taking a political economy perspective, to convey the expectations, the difficulties, and the politics of a society in transition.
An overview of Turkey's experience with the 1980 stabilization and structural adjustment program is followed by three essays focusing on Turkey's economic and policy environments. A detailed coverage of the politics and the institutional characteristics of the economic reforms implemented since 1980 provides important links between political realities and macroeconomic outcomes. Other essays that follow focus on the inconsistency, insufficiency, and timing of the stabilization policies as possible causes of the program's failure to achieve fully its long-term objectives. Also provided are a discussion on the responses of Turkish industrial firms to the liberalization policies and an assessment of political risk in investing in Turkey.
The theme that unites these works, written at different moments over the course of the poet's career (at increasingly wider intervals), is the author's attempt to define his identity through the equivocal and duplicitous medium of language. Well acquainted with the European and Spanish canon, as well as the etymological roots of the Spanish language, Rodriguez possesses an intuitive sense of poetic rhythm and a special gift for metaphor that characterizes only the most outstanding poets. But the poetry, while so efficacious on the level of the signifier, is also solidly and profoundly rooted in Western philosophy, one of Rodriguez's lifelong interests.
Economics and Politics of Turkish Liberalization provides invaluable insights and timely perspectives on the liberalization process in Turkey. The analyses will be valuable contributions to ongoing research aimed at developing a better understanding of Turkey's stabilization and liberalization process.
