People may argue from ideology for or against politics like these, but I can think of no clearer indication of these policies' failure than the impoverishing of a country.
In 2014, Erdogan was elected as President. In 2017, Turkey went through a constitutional referendum that made the President head of the executive branch.
I'm noting this because much of Erdogan's popularity is rooted in Turkey's GDP growth between 2003-2013.
Your currency tanking is worse than having the GDP going down.
edit: I mean that as a genuine, serious question, how is that worse?
Many authoritarian (or especially populist) governments KNOW they will lower the GDP because by limiting low-wage labor immigration or focusing on nurturing a native culture or preserving the environment and not buying into a soulless consumerism/globalization they are creating a GDP cap.
"growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell" --edward abbey
(I don't know anything about what's happening in Turkey, I just don't believe in GDP as a metric to chase)
More broadly, I think lots of nations today could maintain healthy economies with flat or shrinking national GDP, but those are countries which have little reason to expect 'natural' GDP increase without a growth ideology. Most obviously, post-industrial nations which can't rely on growing populations or rapid labor productivity boosts from urbanization and infrastructure investment: Sweden or the UK could plausibly operate at near-constant GDP, and Japan could even grow per capita GDP while shrinking national GDP. More subtly, nations which actively avoid pursuing the common arc of demographic transition, urbanization, and industrialization: Mongolia or Bhutan might try to take an entirely different path. And crucially, any of these nations would need to plan for the outcome: if Sweden 0% GDP growth without intending to, it would point to serious economic problems.
Given all of that, Turkey seems like a singularly bad candidate for falling total GDP. The population is still growing at 1.5% and labor productivity at 2%-3%, while experiencing urbanization and major infrastructure expansion. Crudely put, 1.015*1.025 ought to net Turkey 4% GDP growth without considering anything any other factors at all, so a substantial decline points to something going badly wrong.
There may also be GDP growth in a country with bad social policies. I wouldn't expect there to be much GDP shrinkage in a country with smart social policies, though.
I think this is my favorite new "correlation does not equal causation" example.
Actually # of suicides would be a good metric for a country’s health.
Unadjusted gdp seems like an entirely pointless metric when as you point out you can look at places like the USA where despite having high gdp there's still widespread poverty.
You're on the right track though, at minimum you need to use something like purschasing power parity (PPP) to account for some effects, and wealth distribution to account for others.
Doing these comparisons meaningfully isn't easy to get right.
That's a very extreme position. People desire more than what can be bought at the market.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/20/reuters-america-update-1-erd...
- greek debt crisis
- brexit
- recent market turmoil
- syrian conflict
all of which have huge impact to Turkish economy as well.
His son-in-law has become the finance minister and furthered the disruption.
Do you realise that Erdogan has been in power since 2001? So if economic downturn is his achievement, then the economic growth is his achievement, too.
That I know, too. And that happened (as in many authoritarian states) so that he could maintain the illusion of legitimacy: "hey look, I'm not a prime-minister forever, I am now president".
But do give Erdogan some credit. He is not stupid. And it's disingenuous and deeply simplistic to paint what happened in Turkey as "Erdogan became President in 2013, look Turkey immediately slid into recession because of that". "Checks and balances" alone cannot explain Turkey's growth prior to 2013.