Transportation-Communication Capital and Economic Growth: A VECM Analysis for Turkey

This paper analyses the short- and long-term relationships between the transportation-communication capital and the output for Turkey. The study applies a Cobb-Douglas production function under the assumption of constant returns to scale and employs co-integration analysis by estimating a vector error correction model (VECM). As a result of the VECM estimation, one co-integrating relationship is detected. The results based on the impulse response function analysis imply that per labour transportation-communication capital appears both to have been a crucial input in the Turkish productive process and to have had a positive crowding in effect on the per labour non-residential total capital formation. Moreover, the results support the argument that the transportation-communication capital has a lagged impact on economic growth. The long-term accumulated elasticity of output to transportation-communication capital has been found to be 0.59. The long-term accumulated marginal product was also calculated. It implies that a 1 Turkish Lira increase in per labour transportation-communication capital results in a long-term rise of 1.45 Turkish Liras in per labour output. All these findings suggest that transportation-communication capital may be a powerful tool for policy-makers to promote long-term per labour real output growth in Turkey.