Looking at the data, Turkey continues to rank high in purchasing power for years and even surpasses many European countries. However, many of us are going through difficult times financially. So, does the increase in Turkey’s purchasing power not affect us?
Economic problems continue to show themselves all over the world. Of course, this has a great impact on our purchasing power. although we Even though we can’t buy everything we see and want IMF, CIA and World Bank data do not say so.
According to the data collected on the ‘List of countries by GDP’ page of Wiikipedia, Turkey ranks high in purchasing power. Well, according to the data, when this is the case, Why do we think we can’t afford anything?
When we look at the data in question, Turkey ranks 11th in terms of purchasing power.
So how is this data calculated?
The ranking above is arranged by looking at the gross domestic product of the countries. All done in a year consumption, investment, government spending collected and this result subtracting import from export is added. The result gives us the gross domestic product for that year.
According to these data, we see Turkey in 11th place. Italy is in the bottom row and France is in the upper row. So why are we located in the middle of two European countries that we can call developed? as if we were struggling economically coming?
Let’s say you buy cherries for 20 TL this year for 1 TL last year, but the amount you produce does not change…
We just talked about how the gross domestic product is calculated. There are two different methods used for this. The first is Real GDP, where prices are kept constant for each year, and the second is Nominal GDP where prices change for each year.
Real GDP is generally used when calculating the growth rates of countries. In the table above, nominal data are discussed. Let us explain the difference simply as follows; Let’s say you produce 100 kg of cherries, the weight of which you sell for 10 TL. The next year, you produced 100 kg of cherries again, but you increased your sales price to 20 TL. Your gross domestic product will have increased considerably compared to nominal values.
Our personal purchasing power may not be positively affected if inflation increases while the amount of products you sell and produce abroad does not change much.
In other words, although we do not see a high increase in production when purchasing a product, we continue to see large increases in nominal values, which also take into account the price hikes due to inflation. Of course in this case it increases the GDP value but our personal purchasing power. does not affect.
change between values, since it is based on the overall production and sales of the country It would not be right to evaluate our personal purchasing power on the basis of these data.
Let’s take a look at per capita income.
When the gross domestic product of the countries is divided by the population of that country, we get the per capita domestic product income. When we look at the World Bank data for 2021, the last year in Turkey per capita income of 9,586 dollars designated as. When we look at the TL equivalent, this figure corresponds to 178,029 TL.
Although it seems like a very high number to us. Turkey ranks 271st with a per capita income of 178 thousand TL. is located. When we look at the gross domestic product data shared by the World Bank last year, we see that Turkey ranks 13th. So in summary; We see that our country’s purchasing power does not have much effect on our purchasing power due to our expenses, population and inflation rates.
Resources: World Bank 2021 per capita income statement, World Bank GDP data, CIA data, IMF April 2022 data, Wikipedia English data, Investopedia
So are we happy?
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