Economic Recovery Continues
Ozan Bakış and Gökhan Dilek
In the light of fully-released January and partly-released February leading indicators, we expect year-on-year GDP growth to be 7 percent for the first quarter of 2020. According to seasonal and calendar adjusted data, we forecast quarter-on-quarter GDP growth as 1.7 percent for the first quarter.
There is a notable base effect in the year-on-year growth rate of the first quarter of 2020, considering the year-on-year growth rate of the same period of 2019 was minus 2.3 percent. A word of caution is necessary at this point. January and February leading indicators do not reflect the adverse impacts of coronavirus pandemic, since these effects have occurred in March for the Turkish economy. Thus, we suspect our estimates for the year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter growth rates of the first quarter of 2020 are somewhat upward biased. It is very likely that our estimates will be smaller in the following months.