According to a recently published Bloomberg article based on a draft law, in Turkey, “economic researchers may face up to 3 years in prison if they publish unofficial data on indicators without first seeking approval of the country’s statistics agency”.
The Bloomberg piece implies that this is a new manoeuvre in the long battle against dissident observers and may well symbolize the transition to the next phase with new egregious efforts to silence public debate in Turkey.
That is probably not so surprising to many, but I cannot get my head over the fact that I took a decision last week, and now I am starting to write regularly (fingers crossed) on the not-so-easy-to-grasp aspects of the political economy of the global South, particularly countries such as Turkey, while Turkish authorities discuss new law to jail researchers. My timing has always been impeccable!
Let’s start with the basics
What if the official statistics do not reflect the actual developments and the socioeconomic changes? The answer of many social scientists living and working under authoritarian regimes is to produce alternatives.
Our GDP-obsessed fossil fuel-based civilization does not let us politically imagine alternatives, having accepted that we are stuck in a corner. We need to find ways to democratize statistics. However, until then, it is good to remind ourselves that statistics are always political artifacts. There is no better way to prove it than to discuss what happened in Turkey in the last couple of years.
At first sight, Turkstat (the name of Turkey’s Statistics Institute) seems to be well-connected with the international statistics offices, like Eurostat. It is internationalized because the institution allegedly conforms to the international standards of statistics production and adopts international best practices. The data published by Turkstat are also used by international financial institutions and the investor community, making decisions and discussing the performance of this “emerging market.”
Yet, even if someone suffers from attention deficit, it is evident that there is a severe problem in Turkstat. The removal of three Turkstat chiefs in the last 12 months and several changes among the top-level bureaucrats reveal the shuffle is not about finding the right set of mind but about the people who can bend the truth the most. Still, there is a limit to the number of such bureaucrats ready to serve in this chaos. For example, in a bizarre turn of events, Kursat Dosdogru, who served as the head of the institute and vice-chair and was removed three times from his posts, has been reappointed again.
If you can spend some time with the Turkish debate, the details appear more striking.
Before counting a few cases, I should also mention that as a blacklisted academic, I cannot receive some of the data even if I officially request it from the institution (Yes! We are on that level).
One of the biggest problems resides in the GDP calculation. 2016 revision was not done properly, using distorted input-output tables. Turkstat also did not produce time series that enables comparing the late 20th century with the last two decades, based on the new GDP calculations. Dissident political-economic circles wrote extensively, but mainly in Turkish, in 2016 and 2017, showing how and why the Islamists artificially boosted the economic output.
Let me pick another one from numerous examples: Each time Turkstat revises the unemployment statistics, they cite international methodology and revisions. Despite adopting these standards, the institution refrained from publishing some unemployment data that could be used to highlight the insufficiency of the ruling party’s industrial policy and incentives. They had the capacity to provide the public with more detailed information, and they chose (or were forced) not to.
The draft law adds insult to the injury. It foresees the imprisonment of an academic who, for example, painstakingly reproduced a time series of Turkstat using an old method or published a new table that underlines how Turkstat ignored some of the dynamics in the Turkish labour market.
There is more
A group of researchers led by Veysel Ulusoy started publishing an alternative inflation series over a year ago. This Inflation Research Group (ENAGrup) calculates daily inflation using automated price checking software and downloading data from chain stores. They declared annual inflation as 142 percent for March 2022, while Turkstat’s ratio was 61 percent. The group faced court action twice last year for undermining Turkstat activities.
Turkey is one of those places you can characterize as the land of distorted series. The abysmal failures of the economic institutions in producing time series and sharing the knowledge with the public are well known and ignored by the international statistics community. Under these circumstances, the Inflation Research Group’s calculations (though it has its own bias because of the price compilation method) are to be paid attention to, not punished.
The draft law targets not only ENAGrup, but also the employment reports of the Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions and poverty benchmark calculations of the Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions, or even the inflation series of the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce, which contradict Turkstat data from time to time.
And there is more: Turkstat is only one of the agencies that publish data non-transparently and pushes many to seek alternatives. Several institutions publish dubious data, make unexplainable revisions and use hard-to-grasp methods in Turkey (all will be discussed in this substack in the upcoming months and probably years). The immense pressure from academics and observers can only be broken by persistent smear campaigns and new court cases. From the infamous reserve make-up of the Central Bank (2019 and ongoing) to the new debt rollover of the Treasury (2021-22), which cannot be traced in the debt stock statistics, there are dozens of examples pointing out similar practices.
The draft law might pave the ground for similar regulations and new rules that will create a new shell around these financial arms of the state.
I am ashamed of the absurdity, but I also know there has never been a better time to work on these anomalies, political artifacts, and hollow recipes.