The Impact of Housing Loans on Economic Growth in Turkey: Times Series Analysis for 2010-2015 Period

One of the latest advancements transforming the global architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry is building information modeling (BIM). Although BIM implementation is at high level in developed countries, it is at a lower level in developing countries. BIM is new to the construction industry in Turkey, with only minor construction firms having implemented it. When making projections based on the current state of the Turkish AEC industry, it is foreseen that it will become mandatory in the near future. Considering this projection, it is doubtful that many construction companies will be caught unprepared for this situation and will not know how to implement BIM. Therefore, this study aimed to identify and model the critical success factors for BIM implementation and their impact size in order to gain insight for the fast and efficient implementation of BIM among construction firms in the Turkish AEC industry, which can be generalized for most developing countries. To reach these aims, a questionnaire was designed with 41 identified success criteria (SC) that were derived through a systematic literature review (SLR). The survey was conducted on construction professionals who actively implement BIM technology at their occupied firms in Turkey and they were asked to rank the importance of 41 SC on a five-point Likert scale. The sampling frame consisted of architects and civil engineers, and in total, 243 responses were received. The differentiation between SC and critical success criteria (CSC) was obtained by using a normalized mean cutoff value. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used to identify the critical success factors (CSFs), and structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to examine the underlying size effects of each CSF on BIM implementation in the Turkish AEC industry. The results of this study reveal 20 CSC for successful BIM implementation, and EFA exhibited three CSFs from 20 CSC. Three critical success factors for BIM implementation in the Turkish construction industry were determined and grouped into two categories. “Awareness of technological benefits” and “organizational readiness and competitive advantages” formed one group and are the most influential critical success factors for BIM implementation. “Motivation of management regarding BIM” formed the second group of critical success factors that have a significant effect.

Large-scale high-rise architecture projects have been central to the rise of the construction industry in Turkey in recent years. This vertical escalation, however, has not been received without dissidence. Scholars, activists, journalists and officials with different viewpoints have participated in media debates regarding the reasons and consequences of this transformation. In these discussions, stakeholders have raised various environmental, cultural and ethical concerns that the vertical organisation of cities generate. Focussing on juxtapositions of Izmir and Istanbul in debates on urban verticality in the city of Izmir, Turkey’s third most populated city, the paper examines how such comparisons with Istanbul, where the recent urban neoliberal transformation is experienced most intensely, have been mobilised to oppose vertical expansion. The paper argues that as a result of the recent centralisation of the Turkish economy around construction, the hyper-visibility of skyscrapers and the concentration of the urban transformation generated by the Turkish construction industry in Istanbul, skyscrapers have become materialised symbols of Istanbul’s integration into global capitalism, neoliberal urbanisation, and the difference between Istanbul and other urban centres in Turkey. This example establishes urban verticality as a discursive axis at which urban centres outside of the Global North establish their difference from each other.

PurposeThe construction industry is a crucial industry for national development worldwide. Because the construction industry is tied to national and international economic activities, the COVID-19 outbreak has limited construction projects. Therefore, this study investigates the most influential factors regarding COVID-19 and their effects on the construction industry.Design/methodology/approachThe potential impacts of COVID-19 on the construction industry were identified through a realistic literature review and interviews with professionals. A questionnaire was distributed via e-mail to architects, civil engineers and contractors who play vital roles during the construction processes. The data were analysed using SPSS 22 and LISREL 8.7 software to quantify the most influential pandemic-related factors faced by the construction industry.FindingsTen influential pandemic factors affecting the construction industry in Turkey were identified. Among them, “increased costs and price escalations due to shortage of raw materials and supply chain disruption” and “challenges with payment and cash flows” were determined as the most influential pandemic factors.Research limitations/implicationsThis research aims to advance comprehension of pandemic impacts and contributes an incipient assessment framework based on 10 determined pandemic factors. Therefore, contractors, architects and civil engineers may analyse their weaknesses and organise precise priorities so that their firms may remain competitive, thus minimising the adverse impact of COVID-19 and possible forthcoming waves.Originality/valueFew studies have identified the effect of pandemics on the construction industry qualitatively, forcing management to make projections to the current situation. Moreover, no study has provided insights into the influential factors of pandemics using quantitative methods. Therefore, this study comprehensively and quantitatively determines the relevant COVID-19 pandemic factors using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and utilises confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling to present a structural model of how pandemic factors affect the Turkish construction industry.

In line with the “economic sectors” definition of the Turkish Statistical Institute (2013), it is possible to define the overall real estate (RE) sector in terms of two main components, the construction industry and other RE business activities. The other RE business sector comprises establishments primarily engaged in renting or allowing the use of their own assets by others. This sector also includes establishments engaged in RE management, selling, buying, appraisal and mortgaging (Turkish Statistical Institute, 2013). Although the other RE business activities have been growing rapidly over the past decade, especially after the 2001 financial crisis, the construction industry has been the largest component of the RE sector. The construction industry has been considered one of the engines of economic growth in Turkey from the early 1960s onwards. Through the reorientation of economic policies starting with the 1980 stabilization program, the industry has been assigned a new role as part of the export oriented growth strategy as Turkish contractors have expanded their activities abroad, especially in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region (Sonmez, 1982). Turkey has been one of the region’s fastest developing RE markets as a result of the economic growth and favourable demographics in the 2000s (FESSUD, 2014). The recent improvements in the Turkish economy, especially the drop in the inflation rate, together with increasing domestic and foreign demand for residential units of RE have led the government to work on a raft of regulatory changes that would facilitate the legal environment for the establishment of a RE mortgage system. These efforts to develop the mortgage system resulted in an increase in the construction of new housing units, the development in mortgage products, and a significant decline in mortgage interest rates. The Turkish Parliament ratified the Housing Finance Law in March 2007 and long- term fixed rate borrowing became, for the first time ever, an available financing option for potential homeowners in Turkey (Erol and Tirtiroglu, 2011)...

The Republic of Turkey is a major force in the international construction market. This paperpresents the construction industry in Turkey. Special attention is paid to the overview of the industry; the size and structure of the construction industry; construction contracts (competitively bid, negotiated, build-operate-transfer, ‘mutual construction’); selection of contractor and bidding law; management structure; construction management techniques (bar chart, progress and development outline, CPM); trend of the domestic market; and international construction.

Planning Engineers’ Estimates on Labor Productivity: Theory and Practice

Endüstri 4.0 ve dijitalleşme bütün sektörleri etkisi altına aldığı gibi Türkiye ekonomisinde önemli bir yer tutan inşaat sektörünü de etkilemiştir. Ancak, inşaat sektörünün diğer sektörlere göre teknolojiyi kullanma ve dijital dönüşüme ayak uydurma noktasında, diğer sektörlere oranla geride kaldığı yönünde eleştiriler yapılmaktadır. Bu noktada, Türk inşaat sektöründe yer alan firmaların dijital dönüşüm uygulamalarına adaptasyonlarını etkileyen unsurların bulunması bu çalışmanın amacını oluşturmaktadır. Çalışmada sırasıyla inşaat sektöründe dijital dönüşüm kapsamında karşılaşılan kavramlar, Türk inşaat firmalarını dijital dönüşüme iten unsurlar, Türk inşaat firmalarının dijital dönüşümünü engelleyen unsurlar ile dijital dönüşümün başarı faktörleri ortaya konulmuştur. Belirlenen faktörler özelinde Türk inşaat firmalarında görev alan toplam 50 adet katılımcıya anket yapılmıştır. Elde edilen veriler “Göreceli Önem İndeksi” yöntemi ile analiz edilmiştir. Türk inşaat sektöründe Yapı Bilgi Modellemesi sıklıkla kullanılmaktayken; zenginleştirilmiş gerçeklik, blokzincir ve akıllı sözleşme gibi uygulamalar henüz sıklıkla kullanılmamaktadır. Türk inşaat firmalarının dijital dönüşüme uyum sağlama yönündeki itici unsurları etkin kalite, doküman ve iletişim yönetimi iken; sektörünün dijital dönüşümü önündeki en büyük engeller yeterli yetkin personel olmaması ve tüm paydaşlar için entegrasyon sağlanamamasıdır. Dijitalleşme etkisinin diğer sektörlere kıyasla çok düşük seviyelerde kaldığı inşaat sektörü için dijital adaptasyonun arttırılması önündeki engelleri, bu adaptasyonu hızlandıracak itici güçleri ve dijital adaptasyon için sahip olunması gereken başarı faktörlerini ortaya koyan çalışmaların sayısı oldukça azdır. Özellikle Türk inşaat sektörü özelinde belirtilen bu faktörlerin kapsamlı bir şekilde analiz edilmesi çalışmanın önemli bir özgün yönünü oluşturmaktadır.

The construction sector became source of controversies in recent years in Turkey. This study is devised to explore the three crucial elements of controversial construction ‘craziness’ that Turkey has experienced since 2002, when the Islamic conservative Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) came to power, sweeping victory in the parliamentary elections with 34.3 per cent of the total votes. The first element is a regarded relation between GDP and the construction industry with its supposedly strong linkages with other industries. The second element is the mounting extensive and direct involvement of the AKP governments in the sector, especially through Housing Development Administration of Turkey. Finally yet importantly, the clientelistic networks between the AKP and some privileged businessmen have to be mentioned. Exploring these elements leads to the conclusion that during the AKP era the political involvement in and the economic development of sector became inextricably enme...

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop a solid understanding of how integrated building information modeling (BIM) is implemented in a mega project such as the (Istanbul Grand Airport IGA) construction project, which is the main case study in the research methodology.Design/methodology/approachThe paper examines and identifies the lean efficiency gains achieved in the IGA project and highlights the synergies between BIM and lean concepts based on the facts and figures from the case study analysis. In complex projects, there is a vital need for a comprehensive approach that would enable successful managing of design and construction information via accurate modeling, collaboration and integration throughout the project lifecycles covering various disciplines.FindingsThe research findings in the paper make a significant impact in understanding the strategic perception for BIM as a new way of working methodology for the construction industry in Turkey, since the IGA project has become not only a key learning hub for the Turkish construction industry, but also a global landmark for digital construction and project delivery. In addition it proves the mutual synergies between BIM and lean practices.Originality/valueThe IGA project is a mega-scale airport construction project with features beyond building industry challenges, and it should be designed and constructed with tight deadlines and budgets and be operated afterwards in an effective and efficient way. Can lean and BIM help for timely and on-budget completion of the project and could they support the management of the airport facility after handover? The paper also discusses the lean and BIM implementation in the project in relation to the BIM Level 3 requirements.

The Greek economy was affected very badly by the global economic and financial crisis of 2007-2008. The main reason of this catastrophic event is that the country’s speedy economic and financial growth in the pre-crisis period heavily based on the foreign funds, and the flow of these funds stopped immediately -even turned to opposite direction- with the spread of the crisis to Europe. This negative happening as well as the rearrangement of the public debts and remarkable reduction in the bank deposits led to a big financial crisis, and thus economic recession. Meanwhile, the loan quality in the banking system worsened extremely -almost half of the credits turned to bad loan- due to the macroeconomic deterioration as well as the banks’ very tolerated lending policies before the crisis, the borrowers’ imperfect attitudes, and improper governance. The improvement in NPLs ratio, which started simultaneously with the modest economic recovery in 2017, decreased it to 30.2 percent in 2020 from its peak level of 48.5 percent in 2016. However, a big part of it has been achieved thanks to write-offs and loan-sales.In this study, it was aimed to measure the effect of the changes in economic growth on these drastic changes in NPLs ratio. Although the changes in the gross domestic product (GDP) and NPLs ratio have always been in consistency with the economic theory, except the pandemic year of 2020, the often big differences between their changing rates imply that some other factors have also played significant role on NPLs movements. The findings of some studies for Greece indicate to remarkable impact of both economic growth and the other factors on bad loans issue. The results of our regression analysis also show that the relation between economic growth and NPLs is not so strong.In spite of the noticeable improvement, NPLs ratio is still at a very high level and requires constant remarkable declines in order to come down to the generally accepted levels. To perform this and have economic and financial recovery at the same time, the recovery should not be achieved only by write-offs and portfolio sales, but by collections from borrowers, and executions. The banks and the government should make the necessary changes in their policies and applications so as to decrease NPLs ratio through new lending, compromise with proper borrowers, and court executions. Keywords: Greece, global crisis, sovereign debt crisis, economic growth, non-performing loans. DOI: 10.7176/RJFA/12-12-05 Publication date: June 30 th 2021

The global crisis in United States began as the form of the mortgage crisis in the housing market. Profound effects the financial crisis emerged in 2008 spread rapidly throughout the world as a result of globalization and also its effects were felt in our country. Both in earlier crises and the emergence and spread of the global economic crisis in the cyclical indicators are known to play an important role. There are different opinions on this subject in the literature. It is seen that there is a relation between the global crisis in the financial sectors and the construction sector based on mostly housing industry. Especially in the developing countries like Turkey, the construction sector, which is an important contribution to the economic growth, is seen negatively affected by the global crisis. The aim of this study is to analyze the variations occurred in the construction industry during the 2008 global economic crisis and is to introduce how the construction sector is affected by the crisis. Here, Turkey's main economic indicators during the crisis are examined considering the construction sector and GDP growth rates. As a result of this study, it is put forward that the construction sector in Turkey is one of the sectors most affected by the global crisis.

It is widely recognised that the construction industry has a positive role to accelerate the wheel of economic growth in any country. This research is concerned with the Libyan construction industry (LCI). Libya is a developing country which suffered from a big loss in its infrastructures and its unemployment rate increased to 30% in the middle of 2013. Regarding the importance of the construction industry through the role it has in providing infrastructure and creating employment and the poor economic condition of Libya, the rationale of this research follows the example of other nations such as Turkey, Singapore, Malaysia , and Middle East countries where the construction industry was evolved with a target to further boost up the process of economic development. The case of Libya in this regard is valid for the financial stability in the country given its oil reserves and the capacity of the country to absorb migrated skilled labour. This situation is expected to follow the fall of Gaddafi’s regime. The approach of selecting construction as providing input to economic growth follows the strong evidence of the significant role that the construction industry plays in economic growth of the country. The construction industry contributes to economic growth from the demand side and in the traditional Keynesian economy, sustainable short-run economic growth is dependent on the increased demand. For example, in the UK, construction’s 2.5% growth in the third quarter of 2013 helped the overall economy grow by 0.8% over the same period. In comparison with the other industries that contribute to the economic growth of developing countries, the construction industry is more labour-intensive while the developing countries are mostly labour-abundant. The main aim of this research is to investigate the contribution of the construction industry to economic development in order to establish a comprehensive list of recommendations and a guideline for achieving an efficient construction industry to accelerate the process of economic growth. For this aim, the first objective is to examine the causal relationship between the construction industry and gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of the economic growth and between the construction industry and other economic sectors. To achieve the aim of this research, Granger causality tests have been conducted. The financial data about the expenditure on the construction industry in Libya and its share in the GDP of the country and the share of the other economic sectors in the GDP during 1986-2009 was provided by an authority from the Libyan construction industry. First, The Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF) and the Philip Perron (PP) unit root tests were conducted to confirm that the tested time series are stationary. After that, to determine the existence of the long-run causal relationship between the CI and GDP, Engle-Granger co-integration test was used and, finally, vector error correction (VER) model was employed to detect the direction of the causal relationship between the two variables. The study found that in Libya, like in other countries, the relationship between the construction industry and GDP is bi-directional: GDP produces a short-term impact on the investment in the construction industry while investment in the construction industry produces a long-term impact on GDP. However, except for trade, no economic sector was found to have a causal relationship with the construction industry. According to these findings, another objective was established in this research: to identify safety and total quality management (TQM) which can play an important role in growing the efficiency of the Libyan construction industry. To achieve this objective, telephone conversations were conducted with the officials of the largest construction company in the city of Benghazi. The findings indicated that the TQM does not exist in the construction company and, although the safety department does exist, it works via strict procedures. Thus, opportunity to increase the performance of the CI in order to increase its contribution to economic growth does exist through implementation of the safety and TQM implementation in Licccbyan construction companies. The previous studies used the causal relationship just to prove specific hypotheses. The novelty of this research is to obtain benefits from the existence of the causal relationship from the CI to GDP in the long term through suggesting major issues as safety and TQM implementation to raise the performance of the CI in the current period in order to increase its contribution to the economic growth in the future.

The study aims to capture the co‐movement between non‐performing loans (NPLs) and economic growth (EG) in Turkey using the quarterly data from 2005/Q1 to 2019/Q4 and applying the wavelet coherence approach, which allows the study to explore both the long‐run and short‐run causal linkages between NPLs and EG in Turkey. The findings reveal that (a) there is a significant vulnerability in NPLs and EG over the selected period at different frequency levels; (b) EG in Turkey has a strong power for explaining NPLs in the long‐run; (c) EG causes NPLs in Turkey in the short‐term between 2007 and 2010, which implies that the credit growth in the period with the increasing NPLs supports EG of Turkey. The outcomes of the tests underline the importance of EG for predicting NPLs in Turkey.

There is general consensuses among scholars on the importance of international trade and foreign direct investment as a main macroeconomic variables that drive economic growth of developing countries. However, the global economic crisis plays dominant role in determining the movement of these macroeconomic variables that can change the nomenclature of economic activities in relation with trade and FDI inflow. For this purpose, this study investigates the relationship between trade openness, FDI inflow and economic growth of Nigeria by accounting for the effects of global economic crisis of 2007–2008 and commodity crisis of 2016 using Bayer and Hanck (in J Time Ser Anal 34(1):83–95, 2013) approach to cointegration and augmented autoregressive distributed lag (AARDL) method on time series data from 1982 to 2018. The results provide evidence that (1) global economic crisis significantly dampens economic growth. (2) The negative interaction of total trade, FDI and global financial economic crisis is substantive enough to dampen the trade-growth and FDI-growth led relationship. (3) The negative interaction of FDI-inflow with global economic crisis is more pronounced and substantive in the long run than the short run. This study recommends for policy option positioned towards escalating specific fiscal measure that should provide a sound legislative rules and reductions in taxes for international investors; stimulus measures targeting measures to control public spending, which had previously fuelled economic expansion.

Ali Ağaoğlu is the leading figure in the construction industry in Turkey, specializing in luxury housing estates. His sales figures have reached record levels since the early 2000s, far surpassing those of other similar entrepreneurs’. While governmental policies that prioritize the development of the construction sector partially account for Ağaoğlu’s commercial success, we contend that the analysis of popular media images is essential in order to understand his estates’ popularity. Based on a close reading of his media appearances in housing commercials and interviews in the light of psychoanalytical theory, we argue that Ağaoğlu has manufactured a realizable fantasy for his clients, which structures their desires in the cultural context of consumer capitalism. However, the limits of Ağaoğlu’s fantasy world of housing were tested in an unexpected outbreak in one of his estates, where the homeowers traversed their fantasies.