Persistence of Profitability and the Dynamics of Competition in Turkey, 1985-2004

The existing empirical literature on the intensity of competition in developing countries shows that the persistence of profitability is smaller in developing than in advanced economies. To solve this controversy, Glen, Lee and Singh (2003) propose to look into the underlying sources of the persistency, namely persistency of monopoly power and of economic efficiency. This paper reports on time series analysis of the persistence of corporate profitability and its constituent parts for the largest 114 manufacturing firms in Turkey. Its central result is that the observed persistency of profits in the markets is due to persistency of productivity rather than the persistency of profit margins suggesting that pro-competitive characteristics of markets overweigh the inimical competition characteristics in Turkey.