Turkey’s minister of finance, Berat Albayrak, arrived at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2019 with a message of assurance. While acknowledging there were “lots of uncertainties” around the Turkish economy, Mr Albayrak maintained that everything was going according to plan, saying: “Currently we don’t see any recession, there is no minus growth… so far, so good.”
Less than two months later, on March 11, the government’s statistical institute’s data showed Turkey had entered a recession in the second half of 2018. Since then, the country’s policy-makers have been in damage control mode. Mr Albayrak, who is president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s son-in-law, is attempting both to see off speculation about deeper structural problems and produce a rapid recovery.
