Turkey’s economy roared back into life in the final quarter of last year as authorities sought to engineer a fresh credit-fuelled boom.
Gross domestic product grew 1.9 per cent quarter-on-quarter in the last three months of 2019, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute.
Compared with the same quarter of the previous year, the economy grew 6 per cent.
The boost was driven by growth in household consumption, which increased 6.8 per cent year-on-year. The increased demand was reflected in a surge in imports of goods and services, which increased by more than 29 per cent compared to the same period the previous year.
The Turkish statistics agency also announced that full-year growth for 2019 was 0.9 per cent — the lowest rate in a decade, as the country was hit by the fallout from a 2018 currency crisis that wiped almost 30 per cent off the value of the lira.
The downturn, which caused a sharp spike in inflation and a rise in unemployment, was a key factor in a series of painful defeats for president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in local elections last year.
Mr Erdogan has set an ambitious target of 5 per cent this year, and has presided over a dramatic pace of rate cuts since last summer as he seeks to reboot growth.
Economists worry that a return to the credit-fuelled booms that Turkey has witnessed in years pasts risks reviving the imbalances that paved the way for the 2018 currency shock, including high inflation and a large current account deficit.
