Butce Fazlasi

According to Dunya newspaper Saudi Oger plans to early payment for Turk Telekom. They won the tender by $6.55 billion and already paid the first installment of $1.3 billion. If they decide to pay the rest $5 billion this year, we may see a budget surplus in 2006 for this first time in God knows how many years.

Even though these are one-time revenues (Turk Telecom, Tupras, Erdemir, Telsim), the economy can grow for a year without increasing the debt stock. This will reduce the debt/GDP ratio and will make it easier to produce budget surpluses in the coming years.

The only concern I have at the moment is that treasury secretary Kemal Unakitan's position is in danger (due to political pressure). He is behind the successful implementation of tight fiscal policy and we know nothing about his potential replacement. I would not be so keen on investing in Turkey unless treasury is implementing a tight fiscal policy.

We will see what's gonna happen in the next few days.