Agricultural support policies in Turkey and evaluation on increasing its efficiency

Agriculture is a very strategic sector in terms of its contribution to the economy and the raw materials it provides to non-agricultural sectors and meeting the need for nutrition. In other words, the agricultural sector has an important place in the financing of development in national economies. This study aims to evaluate the agricultural support policies applied in Turkey and test their effectiveness empirically, taking into account the importance of the agricultural sector. In the study, the effect of agricultural supports on agricultural output with a 29-year data set covering 1991-2019 in Turkey was investigated by ARDL bound test and Toda-Yamamoto causality methods. As a result of the analysis, both short- and long-term agricultural support policies do not significantly affect agricultural output. However, the finding that the increase in GDP per capita reduces agricultural output was statistically significant in the short and long term. Similar results were obtained with the FMOLS and DOLS estimators to test the robustness of these results. Finally, the Toda-Yamamoto estimation results, which were used to investigate the causal relationships between the relevant variables, indicate a unidirectional causality relationship from GDP per capita to agricultural output. Considering the findings, the agricultural support policies given to the agricultural sector in the relevant period are ineffective, and policymakers should carry out simple and effective agricultural support policies that will increase productivity and output.