Oil prices don't explain the rise in Turkey's external deficit

Turkey reported another large shortfall on its current account in December, which pushed the deficit for last year as a whole to 6.4% of GDP. Rising oil prices partly explain the increase in the external deficit but are by no means the whole story. Without the pick-up in the price of oil last year, Turkey would still have run a current account deficit of around 5% of GDP. Instead, the underlying problem remains a low domestic savings rate.