For thousands of years sultans, kings and rulers have descended on Turkey to hunt and trap, its unique geography providing rich habitats for wild boar, ibex, bears and wolves. Impressive development since 2002, with the country clocking up average annual growth rates of around 7%, has led among other things to the emergence of specialist tour companies catering for the modern hunters who now head for the country’s great outdoors. But it would appear that it is Turkey itself that is now ensnared,

“The dogs bark, but the caravan rolls on,” according to a blunt Turkish proverb, which economic policy-makers will be hoping applies to the outcome of elections on June 7. The meaning of the saying is clear – suggesting that no matter how much noise is made by critics of the country’s economic policies under the ruling AKP Party, they are unlikely to change their direction. But rising political risk heightened by signs of growing autocracy under the architect of Turkey’s transition, President Re

It is a tale of two public-private partnerships – on the one hand a hospital and on the other an airport. The first is a state-of-the-art 1,550-bed hospital PPP signed for Adana Integrated Healthcare Campus Project in southern Turkey in mid-December. “This is the first project whose finance agreement has been signed out of a total of 30 health campus projects in Turkey,” said Carlo Vivaldi, head of Central and Eastern Europe at UniCredit. It is everything a PPP should be. The €540m (US$605.4m) c

Turkey’s elections in June have fed considerable debate about the future direction Turkey will take. Since Kamal Ataturk founded the modern state and set the country on the path of political pluralism and democracy, Turkey’s desire to integrate with Europe has been taken for granted. It has often been presumed Turkey would wait patiently at Europe’s front door, while continuing to liberalise its economy and increase foreign trade for as long as it took for Europe to come around to the idea of we

With weakening economic growth, a record depreciation of its currency, and elections looming in June, Turkey could logically be assumed to be of only mediocre interest to investors in 2015. Yet the country’s banking sector appears to be as attractive as ever, and continuing investment by foreign banks suggests the long-term outlook may be more positive. Seventeen of the 45 banks operating in Turkey are classified by regulators as being foreign-owned, according to data from the Banks Association

From a near standing start five years ago, Turkey’s local bond market has grown rapidly in recent years. Yet like any new market it has faced challenges, particularly from the uptick in FX volatility and uncertainty about the future path of rates, both in Turkey itself and in the US. The market has seen increased activity since the government introduced new legislation that lowered the tax rates incurred and easing the registration procedure. Growth has been impressive in percentage terms but ha

The next few years promise to be a challenging environment for emerging markets, especially for Turkey as the US Federal Reserve looks to normalise monetary policy and hike interest rates for the first time since the global financial crisis. If Turkey can reduce its reliance on capital inflows and boost foreign investor confidence, it will be better positioned to meet this challenge. Turkey has been among the most heavily impacted by the Fed’s setting the stage for higher rates, exposing its rel

Man is not truly one, but two, said Robert Louis Stevenson. The same might be said to be true of most countries, not least Turkey, a nation with diametrically opposed faces: one commercial, one political. First-time visitors see an increasingly modern country whose economy is driven quietly from within by an “intelligent and capable business elite and a strong entrepreneurial spirit”, said Timothy Ash, head of emerging market research in London at Standard Bank. The country’s political mien is r

Life, as the class-cutting film character Ferris Bueller once noticed, moves pretty fast. Blink, and you could miss it. The same is true of modern flows of institutional money. Capital these days falls in and out of love with sovereigns, and the assets held and listed within them, with the pace and fickleness of hormonal teenagers. One minute, fund managers are having a love-in with a country’s debt and equity securities; the next, they’re being tossed into a garbage can marked “hazardous: do no

Turkey’s economy should be steaming ahead. Many of the key ingredients for success are there: a dynamic, entrepreneurial and relatively young population; solid, well-run banks; low labour costs. The nation’s finances are reasonably strong, thanks to low government debt as a share of economic output (45.1% in 2013, down from 46.9% the previous year, according to the World Bank), and a strong export base. Even oil prices, once the bane of budget officials, have come to Turkey’s aid, tumbling helpf

Turkey has also become an energy crossroads, with tanker traffic and oil and gas pipelines placing it squarely at the centre of the compass. Historically, it looks west for institutional models while looking east to anchor its conservative cultural instincts. And politically and economically, it has contorted itself trying to reconcile authoritarian reflexes and backward hinterlands with the allure of pluralist democracy and economic liberalism. But despite having all the ingredients for success