The Impact of Financial Crises on the Informal Economy: The Turkish Case

Turkey has a large informal economy and has been hit by severe financial crises causing a devastating impact on its economy. The main objective of this paper is to analyse the impact of financial crises on the informal economy in Turkey. We distinguish between four types of financial crises that make up or aggregate financial crises: internal, external, currency and banking crises. Using vector autoregression (VARX) in the presence of two key variables (the financial crisis and the informal economy), we conduct annual time series analysis from 1980 to 2011 and estimate the response of the informal economy to each type of crisis. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical study to examine the effects of financial crises on the informal economy in the context of the Turkish economy. The results show that each type of crisis produces a significantly positive response to the informal economy. In particular, the findings of this paper show that financial crises tend to have a permanent positive effect on the informal economy, suggesting that the informal economy is an important buffer, which tends to expand in times of crises in Turkey. (JEL E26, G01)