Turkey Government Bonds

Turkey has the sixth largest local currency bond market among the emerging market countries. Its key instruments are corporate bonds, commercial paper and bank bills.

The corporate bond market in Turkey amounted to only TL481 million (US$340million) at the end of 2009, jumping up to TL1.4 billion5 (US$1.9 billion) in end 2010 and to TL4.3 billion in end 2011. This is still very small in comparison to other major emerging market countries.

Since the Turkish eurobond market opened in early 2011, banks and corporates are now allowed to issue eurobonds directly without having to pay withholding tax on interest payments under the bonds. This change in law, along with the favourable market conditions, has encouraged many Turkish issuers (predominantly banks) to come to market.

Strategic benchmarks in public debt are:
- To make borrowing mainly in TL;
- To use fixed rate TL instruments as the major source of domestic cash borrowing and decrease the share of debt which has interest rate refixing period less than 12 months;
- To increase the average maturity of domestic cash borrowing taking market conditions into consideration and decrease the share of debt maturing within 12 months;