A Multisectoral Cofeature Analysis of Fluctuations in the Turkish Economy

While there are numerous empirical studies on business cycles for developed economies, there are very few analyses regarding developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to document the comovement among sectoral outputs in Turkey, a developing country, and provide evidence about the importance of real factors to explain fluctuations. Specifically, we ask whether business activity in Turkey is generated by a few forces and whether there are differences in the shape, duration, and amplitude of cycles of individual sectors. Furthermore, we examine the relative importance of permanent and transitory innovations. Using sectoral data for fifty years, and employing cointegration and cofeature analysis, we find evidence in favor of strong comovement of sectors in the Turkish economy. Nonetheless, the evidence that almost all variation in total innovations in all sectors could be attributable to permanent innovations implies that the sources of the fluctuations could be real factors. The findings about the procyclicality and amplitudes of transitory components, as well as about the relative importance of permanent innovations, is unlike the evidence reported for advanced economies in earlier research.