MÜSİAD President Abdurrahman KAAN evaluated the growth figures for the whole of 2020 and for the fourth quarter announced by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK).
The written statement made by MÜSİAD President Abdurrahman Kaan regarding the growth figures for the whole of 2020 and for the fourth quarter announced by TÜİK is as follows;
As the most difficult economic process of recent history, COVID-19 had created, throughout 2020, an environment of uncertainty so great that it could not be compared with any crisis the global economy had previously experienced. As we will recall, the global economy, which had to face the Gulf Wars in the 1990s; the September 11 Events, the Iraq War and finally the 2008 Financial Crisis in the 2000s; and Brexit and the Trade Wars when the 2010s came, thus began the 2020s with the COVID-19 crisis as well. In this process, while the global system entered a great shock in terms of both supply and demand, the mobility of capital, goods and people came almost to a standstill.
In such a difficult period, we regard the Turkish economy’s maintaining its positive growth trend and growing at a rate of %1.8 over the year as a performance worthy of appreciation. At the same time, the Turkish economy, which grew at a rate of %5.9 in the last quarter of the year, became the only country, together with China, to achieve positive growth throughout 2020 among the G20 countries, and is among the leading countries that have come through this difficult process with only slight damage.
Of course, in order for the growth performance in question to attain a sustainable quality, a long and difficult road lies ahead of us. In this process, we must maintain the vitality in economic activity by continuing the fight against COVID-19 very carefully. As MÜSİAD, we believe that in the coming period we must go beyond the effort we have shown to date in the production-trade-investment triangle.
In this context, we welcome the %8.2 increase observed in household consumption and the %10.3 expansion in investments in the last quarter of the year. At the same time, we reiterate that in 2021, in order for net external demand to contribute more to growth, we must definitely give weight to export-oriented manufacturing production.
We hope that the industrial sector, which expanded at a rate of %10.3 in the last quarter of the year, and the manufacturing industry, which grew at a rate of %10.5, will maintain their quality of being the locomotive of growth in 2021 as well. For, as we state at every opportunity, the greatest advantage of Türkiye, which is a candidate to become a great production base, when compared with its counterpart countries, is its existing manufacturing potential and flexible production capacity. We believe that with this potential our country will continue to increase its positive growth performance in the period covering 2021 and beyond, with the driving force of mutually compatible monetary and fiscal policies as well.