The Role of Macroprudential Policies on Controlling Credit Growth:The Case of Turkey

Abstract

Following the global financial crisis, the quantitative easing policies implemented by developed countries to recover from the crisis led to large capital inflows into developing countries. In the face of macro-financial risks associated with capital flows, policy authorities had to deal with various policy dilemmas between price stability and financial stability. The need to support monetary policy with additional tools to ensure price stability and financial stability simultaneously has led many developing countries to increase the use of the macroprudential policy. Turkey is also among the emerging market economies exposed to the macro-financial risks caused by large capital inflows. Unable to control the risks that accumulated due to the divergence between domestic demand and external demand, the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey began to implement a new policy mix from November 2010. To this end, the conventional inflation targeting was modified by incorporating financial stability as a supplementary objective without prejudice to price stability and monetary policy was conducted together with macroprudential policy. This study investigates the effectiveness of macroprudential policies to control excesses in credit growth under the new policy mix in Turkey. Different from the literature on Turkish experience, an index is constructed to analyze macroprudential policy. By employing cointegration approach with structural breaks of Johansen et al. (2000) the relationship between macroprudential policy index and real total credit growth was estimated covering the period from November 2010 to December 2017. Our empirical findings indicated that macroprudential policy implementations in Turkey have had a limiting effect on credit growth. However, this effect emerged after the tightening of the macroprudential policy stance was increased.