The World Bank In Turkey 1993 2004

This book examines the objectives set by the World Bank for its operations in Turkey in the period 1993-2004 and the extent to which those objectives were met.

The persistent potential for large scale natural disasters has become a real concern for the Turkish government since the late 1990s, which ultimately led to the establishment of the Turkish Catastrophe Insurance Pool (TCIP). Among the main rationale of the creation of the TCIP were a grave government fiscal exposure to natural disasters and a disproportionately low level of catastrophe insurance penetration for such a disaster-prone country. Since the commencement of this program in 2000, the TCIP has provided coverage to more than 2 million households, being by far the largest insurance program in the country. In four years, the TCIP has managed to become one of the most trusted brand names in the Turkish insurance industry, and one of the largest catastrophe insurance pools in the world. Its success has also brought an international recognition, inspiring more than a dozen of countries world wide. The TCIP experience has also been a watershed for the World Bank as it has led to a rethinking of the roles of ex ante risk management relative to ex post donor support. This book presents the main technical imperatives and challenges in the development and the implementation of the TCIP and shows how a public-private partnership may be the way forward in the financing of natural disasters. If offers valuable advise and guidelines to policymakers involved in the development of catastrophe insurance programs.

This report was prepared by a team led by Roberto Zagha, under the general direction of Gobind Nankani.

This volume provides a comprehensive study of Turkey’s financial transformation into one of the most dynamic, if not trouble-free, emerging capitalisms. While this financial evolution has underwritten Turkey’s dramatic economic growth, it has done so without ameliorating the persistently exploitative and unequal social structures that characterize neoliberalism today. This edited volume, written by an interdisciplinary range of political economists, critically examines Turkey’s financial transformation, contributing to debates on the nature of peripheral financialization. Eschewing economistic interpretations, The Political Economy of Financial Transformation in Turkey underscores both the quantitative significance of exponential growth in financial flows and investments, and the qualitative importance of the state’s institutional restructuring around financial imperatives. The book presents today’s reality as historically rooted. By understanding the choices made under the new Republic (from 1923 onwards), one can better locate the changes launched as a newly liberalizing society (since 1980). Likewise, the decisions made in response to Turkey’s 2001 financial crisis spurred a tectonic break in state–market–society financial relations. The waves of change have reached far and wide: from corporate strategies of accumulation and growth to small- and medium-sized enterprises’ strategies of financial survival; from how finance has penetrated the provisioning of housing to how households have become financialized. Put together, one grasps the complexity and historicity of the power of contemporary finance. One also sees that the changes made have not been class-neutral, but have entailed elevating the interests of major capital groups, particularly financial capital, above the interests of the poor and workers in Turkey. Nor are these changes constrained to its national borders, as what transpires domestically contributes to the making of a financialized world market. Through this ‘Made in Turkey’ approach the contributions in this volume thus challenge dominant understandings of financialization, which are derived from the advanced capitalisms, by sharing the specificity of emerging capitalisms such as Turkey.

This review provides an independent assessment of the World Bank Group's performance in achieving key development objectives, with a special focus on support for environmentally sustainable development consistent with economic growth and poverty reduction.

The economies of Turkey and Egypt, remarkably similar until the early 1980s, have since taken divergent paths. Turkey has successfully implemented a policy of export led industrialisation whilst Egypt’s manufacturing industry and exports have stagnated. In this book, Amr Adly uses extensive primary research to present detailed comparisons of Turkey’s and Egypt’s state administrative and private sector capacities and links between the two. The conclusion the author draws is that the external contexts for both were so alike that this cannot account for their diverging paths. Instead, the author suggests a counterintuitive yet compelling explanation; that a democratic polity is far more likely than an authoritarian one to engender a successful developmental state. Emerging in the wake of the January revolution in Egypt, when hopes for democratisation were raised, this book provides a fresh perspective on the topical subject of state reform and development in the Middle East and will be of interest to students and scholar alike.