The Turkish government aims to improve the current account balance and provide sustainable growth in the coming three years, the nation’s treasury and finance minister said Tuesday.
Speaking during the presentation of the government’s New Economic Program for the 2021-2023 period, Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak said normalization steps will continue in the coming weeks and will support financial stability.
Turkey expects its economy to grow by 0.3% this year as it recovers from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, Albayrak said, but he warned of a 1.5% contraction in the worst-case scenario.
The minister said that gross domestic product (GDP) growth will slow in the fourth quarter compared with the third quarter but will accelerate to 5.8% in 2021. The program projects a 5% growth in 2022 and 2023.
“We determined the main themes of the New Economic Program as ‘new balancing,’ ‘new normal’ and ‘new economy,'” Albayrak said.
“To reach our growth targets, we will focus on exports, value-added production and employment as we’ve always done,” he added.
The Turkish economy despite the pandemic has managed to do better than its peers in the second quarter of the year and fared better than forecasts, aided by the government’s stimulus campaign.
The country’s gross domestic product (GDP) in the April-June period shrank 9.9% from a year earlier after growing 4.4% in the previous three months.
The coronavirus lockdowns brought activity in Turkey to a near standstill, just like other countries around the world. Ankara had shut schools and some businesses, closed borders and adopted weekend stay-home orders after it reported its first COVID-19 case on March 11. The economy was mostly reopened in June.
Economic indicators “point to a strong V-type recovery in the economy from the third quarter and a clear turn to positive growth figures,” Albayrak said, adding Turkey was diverging positively from the economies of many developed and developing countries.
But areas such as tourism, transport and the services sector generally had not yet recovered to the desired level. “It is of vital importance to revitalize the services sector which employs around 15 million of our people,” he said.
