Abstract:

This study aims to find out whether Turkey converges with the Maastricht criteria or not by the standard unit root tests of Augmented Dickey Fuller (1979) and Phillips-Perron (1988) and the unit root test of Zivot-Andrews (1992), which takes structural breaks into account. According to the results of the standard unit root tests and Zivot-Andrews (1992) test, budget deficit / GDP and public debt / GDP series contain unit root while inflation rate does not contain unit root. However, since the standard unit root tests do not take structural breaks into account, in the case of structural breaks, series which are actually stationary tend to be non-stationary; thus, incorrect results can be obtained. Therefore, the Zivot-Andrews (1992) unit root test was applied to the same series. According to the test result, Zivot-Andrews (1992) gave the same result as the standard unit root tests. Therefore, according to standard and structural break unit root tests, Turkey converges with the Maastricht criteria in terms of inflation rate while it does not in terms of the budget deficit and public debt.

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