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Corruption has been one of the challenging topics in public economics for years, prompting extensive discussions from various perspectives. In this study, we investigate the causal relationship between government size and corruption in Turkey, where the anticorruption performance has been getting worse over time until recently. By utilizing a long-span news-based corruption index spanning approximately three-quarters of a century, we conclude that government size serves as the long-term driving force behind corruption in Turkey from 1950 to 2019. This conclusion is robustly reached through a battery of dynamic time series analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigate the relationship between corruption and total factor productivity (TFP) in Turkey. Our study contributes to the literature in several ways in terms of data, empirical specification, and method. First, we use a new and novel index of corruption for Turkey between the years 1950 and 2014. Second, we estimate the long-run cointegrating relationship between corruption and TFP in Turkey. Finally, we not only investigate how corruption affects TFP, but also if this effect is conditional on government size. We find that corruption decreases TFP in the long-run and its adverse effects on TFP increases with government size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complex historical relationship between commercial agriculture and capitalist transformation is examined here by looking critically at cotton production in two areas of the Ottoman empire during the nineteenth century. Cotton became important economically on large farms established to meet increasing foreign demand. In Egypt, which was a major region of the southern empire, a state monopoly was established under the control of a governor with the object of participating in the growing foreign trade in cotton-based products. These attempts did not, however, lead to a transformation of rural property relations in Ottoman agriculture. This process of commercialisation led much rather to the consolidation of petty commodity production, not least because of its economic role as a source of labour-power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]