Strong Growth in the First Quarter
Ozan Bakış and Gökhan Dilek
In the light of fully-released January and February, and partly-released March leading indicators, we expect year-on-year GDP growth to be 6,9 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. We would like to remind that the adverse effects of Coronavirus Pandemic on the Turkish economy has not yet been reflected in our calculations because the pandemic started to affect the economy in March. This lack of information in our forecasts will disappear when our next and third forecast utilizes the data of all the three months. Yet we think that the GDP growth in the first quarter of 2020 will be solid because only the March data is affected by the pandemic while the actual impacts of the pandemic will reveal in the second quarter.