Common use of The Data Clause in Contracts

The Data. We have constructed a panel of real exchange rates with Turkey’s seventeen major trading partners: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA. The choice of trading partners was dictated by (a) the share they had in Turkey’s total trade, (b) data availability, and (c) the desire to benefit from the added heterogeneity that a larger panel may provide. We found that these seventeen countries account, on the average, for 64.5% of Turkey’s trade for the period 1989-2001. We had to leave out important trading partners such as Russia (with an average share of 5%) and Iran (1.8%) because price and/or exchange rate data were not available. On the other hand, relatively smaller trading partners, such as Denmark (0.52%), Finland (0.52%) and Greece (0.81%) were included to increase the heterogeneity in the panel. The series are monthly and cover the period 1984.01-2001.06. The price index used in the construction of the series is the Consumer Price Index (1987=100). The exchange rates and the domestic CPI series were obtained from the Central Bank database. The foreign CPIs were downloaded from the International Financial Statistics database and their base years were shifted to 1987.