Turkey won itself a dubious honour at the weekend: a fuel tax hike made it the mainstream economy with the most expensive petrol in the world. It all depends on the vagaries of the exchange rate of course, but the new price of TL4.83 a litre, or €2.08, outstrips Norway’s €2.06, according to AFP, leaving other high fuel tax economies such as Italy, the Netherlands and Spain some way behind.
Then the government followed by increasing gas and electricity rates by 10 per cent on Monday.
Such increases serve a twin purpose in Turkey, albeit at the risk of stoking inflation: they reduce the country’s current account deficit, more than 80 per cent of which is accounted for by energy imports, and also help plug the country’s much smaller budget deficit.
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