120 Ahmet İçduygu
to Europe is large enough, and has been the most important source of
foreign-exchange earnings (Köksal & Liebig 2005; Kumcu 1989). Over
US$75 billion has been remitted in Turkey since the early 1960s, giving
the average annual f igure of US$1.9 billion (İçduygu 2005; and see Table
3.6). Workers’ remittances increased from a modest US$93 million in 1967
to a peak of US$1.4 billion in 1974 and then declined to US$893 million
in 1978. Turkey had a more-or-less-consistent level of annual-remittance
receipts of around US$1.5-2.0 billion between 1979 and 1988. In this period,
almost a quarter of Turkey’s annual total import bill was f inanced by
remittance receipts. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the country
had annual remittance receipts of about US$3.0 billion, which increased
to US$3.4 billion in 1995, and then peaked at over US$5.0 billion in 1998.
In the 1990s, remittances were the equivalent of more than one third
of the trade def icit. The percentage declined in the late 1990s and early
2000s, but still averages close to 20 per cent. While the declining trend of
remittances to Turkey since 1999 is very obvious, they have been falling
particularly since 2002, but the nature of this recent decline is not so clear:
it is due partly to the rising tendency towards permanent settlement in
the host countries, partly to increasing informal channels of remittances,
and partly to the changing calculations of remittances in the accounting
of the national budget.
Table 3.6 Remittance inflows, exports and imports in the Turkish economy,
1964–2010 (million US$)
Ye a r Remittances Exports Imports Remittances as %
trade deficitRemittances
as % GNP
19 6 4 8 411 537 6.3 0.1
19 65 70 464 572 64.6 0.6
19 6 6 115 490 718 50.6 0.8
19 67 93 523 685 5 7. 4 0.6
19 6 8 107 496 764 40.0 0.6
19 69 141 537 801 53.3 0.7
1970 273 588 948 75.8 1. 5
1971 471 677 1,171 95.4 2.7
1972 74 0 885 1, 563 10 9.1 3.3
1973 1,183 1, 317 2,086 153. 8 4.1
1974 1,425 1, 532 3,777 63.5 3.6
1975 1, 313 1,401 4,738 39.3 2.7
1976 982 1,960 5,129 31.0 1.8
1977 930 1,753 5,797 23.0 1. 5