'Stability came out of the ballots'

Turkey voted for stability in June 22 elections, said Tanıl Küçük during the regular assembly meeting of Istanbul Chamber of industry (ISO) on Wednesday. Küçük said that the public clearly expressed their preference on the continuation of Justice and Development Party (AKP) government.

Küçük had previously said that single party government is not a magical formula for

creating stability. When reminded about this statement Küçük said that his previous words were misunderstood. “Of course, single party government is a very important ingredient of political stability, but it is not a must. What I said was that you do not have to a guarantee that single party governments would ensure stability,” he said.
Küçük also underlined that the reverse is also a possibility. “Coalitions can ensure stability too, because the risk of doing reforms is dispersed in coalition governments. On the other hand, single party governments sometimes hesitate to make radical changes. We always point out to tax reform as an example,” added Küçük.

Meanwhile, results of ISO Top-500 Industrial Establishments research were presented to the ISO members during the assembly meeting.

Economy professor Güngör Uras also attended the meeting and evaluated the research results. Uras said that the success of the privatization process in Turkey could be observed by looking at ISO-500 results. “The number of the public

companies in the list declined to 13 from 69 in ten years. This is a success story. However, Turkish economy lost many important public institutions like Sümerbank or Etibank. I wish we could privatize them without ending their operation,” said Uras.
Uras also noted the importance of creating global business in order to keep up with the competition and said that there has been a growing interest on small and medium enterprises (SMEs), yet this interest should be shifted to big business institutions.

Interest rates need to go down:
Assembly member Memduh Hacıoğlu said that they were expecting the Central Bank to immediately pull the interest rates down to prevent the overvaluation of YTL. “Hesitation of the Central Bank is damaging the Turkish economy. The government is also complaining for the high interest rates,” he said.