MÜSİAD President Abdurrahman KAAN assessed the growth figures for the whole of 2020 and for the fourth quarter announced by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK).

The written statement 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 challenging economic process of recent history, Covid-19 created an environment of uncertainty throughout 2020 that was greater than could be compared with any crisis the global economy had previously experienced. As we will recall, the global economy, which had to confront 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 by the 2010s, thus began the 2020s with the Covid-19 crisis. In this process, while the global system entered a major shock in terms of both supply and demand, the movement of capital, goods and people came almost to a standstill.

We regard the Turkish economy's growth of %1.8 over the year as a whole, sustaining its positive growth trend in such a challenging period, as a commendable performance. At the same time, the Turkish economy, which grew by %5.9 in the last quarter of the year, became the only country alongside China to achieve positive growth throughout 2020 among the G20 countries and ranks among the leading countries to have come through this difficult process with the least damage.

Of course, there is a long and difficult road ahead of us for this growth performance of ours to acquire a sustainable quality. In this process, we must maintain the vitality of economic activity by continuing the fight against Covid-19 with great care. As MÜSİAD, we believe that in the coming period we must surpass the effort we have shown to date within the production-trade-investment triangle.

In this context, we welcome the %8.2 increase observed in household consumption in the last quarter of the year and the %10.3 expansion in investments. At the same time, we reiterate that we must certainly place emphasis on export-oriented manufacturing production so that net external demand can contribute more to growth in 2021.

We hope that the industrial sector, which expanded by %10.3 in the last quarter of the year, and the manufacturing industry, which grew by %10.5, will maintain their quality of being the locomotive of growth in 2021 as well. For, as we have expressed at every opportunity, the greatest advantage of Türkiye, a candidate to become a major production base, when compared with its peer 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, driven also by mutually consistent monetary and fiscal policies.