Is Turkey the Next Argentina? Detrimental effects of Capital Inflows

Two excellent articles by some of the few really good Turkish social scientists that exists. First one is a short op-ed piece published in the International Herald Tribune by Erinc Yeldan, professor of Economics and the Dean of Administrative Sciences in Bilkent University. The link: http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/03/opinion/edweisbrot.html Basically, they argue that Turkey's supposedly miraculous growth in the last two years has been due to capital inflows (not foreign direct investment, just stock exchange speculation, just cash) amounting to $10 billion in 2003, and $12 billion in 2004. So, it only takes a little scandal or a little bit of suspicion to scare the investors and then they'll pull out their $22 billion, which amounts to more than 10% of Turkish GDP already, and then the economy will crash, probably worse than in 2001.
The second one is a much longer article by Caglar Keyder, a prominent Turkish political scientist, one of the two or three with a UC Berkeley Ph.D. (the other one that I know is Ilkay Sunar, but maybe there is another one or two hiding somewhere). His article is titled "The Turkish Bell Jar". Here is the link: http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR26204.shtml Enjoy.