An Empirical Research on the Saving–Investment Relationship for the Turkish Economy

Abstract

For the research field of international macroeconomics, one of the stylized facts that researchers often observe empirically is the strong dependency of domestic investments to national savings. Feldstein and Horioka (1980) accept such a relationship as an indicator of capital mobility and try to examine how an increase in the national saving level finances domestic investments. The authors perceive this as a puzzle for the assumption that world capital markets are well-integrated. The paper aims to test the validity of such a relationship for the case of the Turkish economy. Not only does this study take account of the estimation result that there exists evidence of a cointegration as an estimation methodology between domestic investments and national savings for the time span 1975 - 2015, but it also enlarges the research area to the sensitivity of findings to the endogenous breaks, and then estimates some regime changes. This study finds a Feldstein – Horioka (FH) coefficient highly smaller than a unity value, and observes some structural breaks associated with policy transformation or macroeconomic crises periods of the economy.