Economic Growth of Turkey under AKP

Erik Meyersson has a new paper (draft) about the economic development of Turkey under AKP. Here's a relevant quote:

I find that Turkey under AKP grew no faster in terms of GDP per capita when compared with a synthetic counterpart from a wide pool of other countries. Restricting the pool of control units to only include Muslim countries shows Turkey growing slower than its Muslim counterpart. Moreover, analysis of post-crisis recovery periods shows Turkey growing no faster than comparable post-crisis cases across time. However, expanding the outcome set to health and education reveals large positive differences in both infant and maternal mortality as well as university enrollment, consistent with stated AKP policies to improve access to health and education sectors for the relatively poorer segments of the population.

I have yet to finish all of it but the paper seems to confirm one of my judgements about the elections with an uninformed electorate. Namely, the electorate really aren't qualified to discern good governance from bad governance.

This is primarily abused in the following way. While feeding proverbial peanuts to "the poorer segments of the population", the parties in power can massively usurp wealth and other resources and commit countless abuses such as wholesale crippling of any dissident media. The poor and uninformed meanwhile think they are having a good time through their diet of proverbial peanuts. Thus, while keeping the electorate poor and uneducated (thus dependent on peanut handouts), the parties in power are able to fend off any electoral challenges. A cesspool of democracy indeed.

Note that Dani Rodrik wrote along similar lines about the Turkish economic myths before.