Popular attitudes toward free markets in Turkey, Iran, former Soviet Union and the United States

Abstract

In order to find whether the major obstacles to the success of free markets are “the attitudes, morals, and understandings of the people themselves, not just the institutions or policies they live with,” Robert Shiller, Maxim Boycko, and Vladimir Korobov (1991) conducted surveys of randomly selected individuals in the Soviet Union and in the United States. The same study was repeated in Iran by Nader Habibi (May 1995). The goal of this thesis is, using the same set of questions that Shiller et al. (1991) used, to collect data on popular attitudes toward free markets in Turkey and compare the results obtained from this survey analysis with those in Iran, former Soviet Union and the United States.