These are created by the fact that the assets and liabilities sides denote different currency units or consist of securities with different interest rates. As a matter of fact, firms with reduced financial risks on their balance sheets can allocate more resources to production. Moreover, derivatives markets introduce new investment instruments and encourage growth in the financial system. In this way, they increase the number of instruments investors can use to diversify their portfolios, and widen the financial markets. As a result, derivatives markets contribute to the increase in national income and employment by ensuring more effective allocation of resources and they provide added value as a separate sector. At the same time, these markets enable the real and financial sector investors to manage diverse risks parallel to those in world markets as well as allowing integration with those markets. Analyzed in terms of monetary policy, derivatives markets, whose development has always been backed by the Central Bank, support the continuity of financial stability by reducing volatility in the markets and help central banks to maintain financial stability. In addition, they enhance the information set used in monetary policy by providing information about the future, and increase the effectiveness of the transmission mechanism used to steer the economy. As a consequence, an improved flow of information about the future course of monetary policy makes the economy more predictable for economic agents. In this framework, the Turkish Derivatives Exchange will make important and diverse contributions to the economy, especially in terms of monetary policy.

Sustainable fiscal adjustment in the medium and long-term will depend on the enactment of structural reforms in the public sector rather than on provisional measures. Besides jeopardizing the attainability of budget targets, a delay in structural reforms will also cause the supposedly provisional measures to become permanent. Such implementation might affect the quality of expenditures and revenues unfavorably and cause inflationary impacts due to revenue-boosting methods. Therefore, increased control and effectiveness in public expenditures are critical factors for the quality of fiscal adjustment. A study comparing the fiscal adjustment policies implemented at different times in OECD countries2 revealed that a long-term improvement in public balance can be achieved through expenditure-curbing policies rather than revenue-boosting policies. Besides controlling public expenditures, incomes policy also plays an important role in increasing the quality of fiscal adjustment. For this reason, the implementation of incomes policy must be coherent with the inflation target. As I have mentioned before, important policies are pending in the upcoming period in the framework of the European Employment Strategy. These policies are aimed at ensuring that high growth performance affects employment in such a way to assure a sustainable increase in employment, to increase the additions to the labor force and to establish a more flexible labor market. Developing coordination in economic policies and a harmonization of the decision-making process is another outstanding factor. All these factors will not only establish macroeconomic stability and increase social welfare in Turkey, but also play a key role in the European Union integration process.