Forecasting the Macro Targets of Turkish Economy for the Year 2000: An Application of Box-Jenkins and Exponential Smoothing Methods

The basic macroeconomic targets of the Turkish economy for the year 2000 and thereafter are to reduce the interest rates to plausible levels and increase the total production in a steady way. The goal of this study is to see if the Turkish government can realize these targets for the year 2000. For this purpose, I employed, here in this study, two widely used forecasting techniques; Box-Jenkins and exponential smoothing procedures to forecast monthly future values of interest rates on deposits and industrial production index. Forecast outputs indicate that interest rate tends to decrease and industrial production index tends to increase. Therefore, it can be concluded that these forecasting methodologies verify that government’s main macro targets will be most likely realized for the year 2000.