Abstract:
Turkey has been going through a liberalization process in its electricity market over the last decade. So
far, the regulatory content of the market reforms has been in the center of attention in the literature, to
the negligence of regulatory governance. However, recent studies, which applied the theoretical
insights of new institutional economics to utilities regulation, have demonstrated that political
endowments of the country draw the boundaries to which extent such regulatory content can be
effectively implemented. In line with these studies, this paper adopts an institutional approach and
attempts to identify the political endowments of Turkey in order to further analyze whether the market
reforms succeeded in bringing about sufficient checks to cure the institutional problems. In other
words, the paper takes a picture of the overall regulatory arena. The results show that the current
regulatory structure, especially government-regulator relations, fails to meet good regulatory
governance criteria. The paper also provides some policy suggestions.
