Monetary Transmission Mechanism In An Open Economy Framework: The Case Of Turkey

Monetary transmission mechanism (MTM) is an illuminating policy tool in appreciating the monetary policy implementations by policy makers upon various nominal and real factors of interest in the eyes of economic agents. Especially in an open economy such as Turkish economy highly exposed to the effects of capital flows on domestic business cycles with a liberalised capital account, control over policy aggregates may be difficult since many other economic policy implementations would be of great consequence on some other policy targets on macroeconomic income generation process and in providing price stability and external balance. In this respect, in our paper we aim to estimate the MTM for the Turkish economy. Our ex-post estimates for the period 1992-2004 using contemporaneous vector autoregression models such as impulse response analysis indicate that weakly exogeneous capital inflows appreciate the real effective exchange rate, and in turn lower the real interest rates and domestic inflation while increasing both the real output growth and also the stock exchange index considering an asset-price channel for the latter and vice versa. We find some significant effects of the courses of capital flows and real effective exchange rate on monetary policy variable in the transmission mechanism, and such a case may impose an endogeneous characteristic on the policy variable given also that both domestic real interest structure is highly sensible to the monetary policy and that monetary policy is subject to the structural breaks in the sense of so-called Lucas’ critique of contemporaneous economics.