Luis Pinedo Caro
Controversy has surrounded TÜİK’s consumer price index since 2019, with a group of independent researchers creating their own methodology (ENAG) and entering into a cycle of legal battles and public complaints together with Türkiye’s main opposition party and other stakeholders that is still ongoing in 2026. This brief examines the impact of these competing methodologies on wage evolution in the country. It finds that TÜİK’s and ENAG’s deflated series produce sharply divergent pictures of real wage developments, and introduces a third, independent approach — converting wages to euros and deflating them using the Euro Area CPI — whose results suggest that the true evolution of purchasing power likely lies between the two; there was real wage erosion for a while, but purchasing power was recovered after the return to an orthodox monetary policy since 2023.
doc. ResearchBrief284
pdf. ResearchBrief284