آشکار ساختن بدهی های عمومی ترکیه: یک روش پرداخت شفاف

We postulate a new method of measuring debt which we call the debt burden (DB). We claim that DB reveals the true debt obligations of the fiscal authority by taking the intertemporal debt obligations of the government into account. It is more accurate and more transparent than the currently used methods of assessing debt. DB is calculated on a daily basis and it clearly identifies debt risks. It is a superior policy making tool for the fiscal authority. DB also reveals the true stance of fiscal dominance and the associated policy tradeoffs faced by the monetary authority.

Is there a better approach to measure Turkey's total public debt burden? The common approach to determine Turkey's public debt has traditionally been in the form of revealing the stock of total debt or the approaching interest payments that the government needs to satisfy its current debt service agreements. The debt service, which is close to our approach, is calculated on a monthly frequency, which fails to capture fluctuations and the information embodied in the volatility of shorter frequencies. In this paper, we concentrate our analysis on daily changes of the total public debt burden, where we investigate intertemporal government debt obligations to assess future stresses on the fiscal authority and evaluate the sustainability of government debt. This innovation allows us to investigate episodes of differing volatilities in Turkey's recent fiscal history. Our approach clearly reveals periods of financial distress in the years of 2000 and 2001. Although, the crisis of 2001 was presented as an outcome of political conflict, it was rather inherent in the accumulated debt burden for the period that involved the crises.1 We identify the available policy options. Government can decrease the cost of borrowing by smoothing its borrowing schedule. The benefits vary between US$ 4 and 6 billion which is equivalent to 1.8–2.7% of gross domestic product (GDP). We also propose that DB could serve as a good proxy to assess risk and provide the true characteristics of fiscal dominance and resulting tradeoffs associated with monetary policy. The next section provides some background on conventional approaches and our approach to debt definitions and issues concerning Turkey's public debt including its sustainability. Section 3 describes the data which is followed by results and policy discussions in Section 4. Finally Section 5 concludes the paper. The two appendices that are provided at the end summarize the mechanical details of our methodology and the assumptions used.

Our results indicate that focusing on daily volatility would have significant gains for the country. The methodology we use is more transparent since it reveals every development of the “debt burden” of the fiscal authority. The data set is robust and presents the characteristics of high frequency data with thick tails and excess skewness. This may allow us to examine research topics such as fiscal dominance in monetary policy making, determinants of interest and exchange rate volatility and the impact of treasury auctions on the secondary markets. We are confident that daily analysis provides policy makers with a strong policy tool in risk management and crisis prediction. In this respect, our methodology is an excellent candidate for sound policy making. Moreover, we can also use our innovative DB approach in suggesting sustainability of debt through intertemporal budget constraint calculations since it includes all principal and interest obligations of the government.