External debt, defence expenditures and political business cycles in Turkey

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between external debt, defence expenditures and political business cycles in Turkey for 1960-2002. Here, two important aspects of the political business cycle, the electoral effects and the partisan effects, were investigated. The empirical finding of impulse response functions of defence expenditures to a shock in the partisan effect is positive. The results reported here indicate that political colours of parties appear to be important. This suggests that defence expenditure is influenced by political ideology and the fiscal policy of governments after elections. Moreover, the impulse response functions of external debt stock to shocks to the electoral effects and the response of external debt stock shocks to the partisan effects increased over the whole period.