see also:
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Table of Contents:
Turkey
Turkey is a country at the crossroads where two continents meet and is an ideal center for investors looking for a location at the heart of Euro-Asia. It is larger than most European countries with the capital city of Ankara located in the center of the country.
The major urban centers and the greatest economic development are found in the Marmara, Aegean and Central Anatolian regions, which extend across central and north-western Turkey. The presence of the major cities of Istanbul, Izmir, Bursa and Ankara within these regions has enabled them to emerge as the predominant manufacturing and industrial districts.
The Turkish electronics industry has experienced exceptional growth over the last three years, and is currently the fastest growing manufacturing sector. The country is particularly competitive especially in the two subsectors of consumer electronics and telecommunications.
The experience of more than 4000 foreign capital establishments, including 104 of the Fortune Top 500 companies, confirms Turkey as a predominant investment location. With increasing consumer purchasing power, Turkey offers a huge and dynamic domestic market to investors, including Alcatel, Siemens, Northern Telecom, Ericsson, Marconi, Motorola, Merloni and Nokia.
Maps:
good map here: http://www.economist.com/node/17276440
Special Reports on Turkey:
1. From CFR.com:
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The report analyzes Turkey's international and domestic issues, including its role within NATO and its political and social development. Assign this report to help students better understand Turkey's evolving global position and think critically about the best way for the United States and Turkey to work together on challenges facing a changing Middle East.Download the Report
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2. From the Economist.com:
read here: "Special Report on Turkey" Oct 2010: http://www.economist.com/node/17276440
In this special report
listen here:
Business
International Trade:
see more in our page: Turkey - trade with the EU
Exports:
- The EU ranks by far as number one in both Turkey's imports and exports while Turkey ranks 7th in the EU's top import and 5th in export markets.
- Main Turkish exports markets in 2007 were:
- the EU (56.4%),
- Russia (4.4%),
- USA (3.9%),
- Romania (3.4%), * should be included in the EU statistics after 2007
- United Arab Emirates (3.0%)
- Iraq (2.6%).
- Biggest exports
- Textiles and transport equipment -- dominate EU imports from Turkey, both accounting for about 24% of the total.
- machinery (17.7%),
- agricultural products (7.1%).
Imports
- Imports into Turkey came from the following key markets:
- the EU (40.8%),
- Russia (14.0%),
- China (7.9%),
- USA (4.8%),
- Iran (3.9%)
- Switzerland (3.1%).
- Biggest Imports:
- Main EU exports to Turkey are machinery (32.2%),
- transport material (18.6%)
- and chemical products (16.9%).
see more in our page: Turkey - trade with the EU
Top companies in Turkey:
source: http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/18/global-09_The-Global-2000_Counrty_14.html
FDI - foreign direct investment
see also: Finance: FDI investment (folder)
2007 data:
- Out to EU: In 2007, €0.3 billion of EU inflows came from Turkey,
- In from EU: while €12.4 billion of EU out-flows went to Turkey.
Investment Promotion Agency:
Turkish Foreign Investment Department
General Directorate of Foreign Investment
Inonu Bulvari
Emek
Ankara, 06510
Turkey
tel: + 90 (0) 312 212 5000
fax: + 90 (0) 312 212 8916
Private Equity in Turkey
Turkey lures private equity: Even with the unending credit crunch still distressing the economy, one market still seems stable and promising. Turkey has attracted more than $2 billion in private-equity investments during the first half of 2008. Turkish Daily News (08/26/2008)
Economy
read more here: http://www.economist.com/node/17276384
BRIC+T ?
Nouriel looks at the club of emerging market economies and considers whether Russia really deserves to be included among the BRIC countries. Purely from the standpoint of economic potential and fundamentals, countries like Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey make a more compelling case. Please read BRICkbats for the Russian Bear .
2009 - Turkey and the Global Economic Crisis:
Turkey’s Policy Rate at All-Time Low: Is the Central Bank Pushing on a String? Over the past year, Turkey's central bank has slashed rates by an extraordinary 950 basis points to 7.25% in September. Further easing is expected. Mary Stokes questions the effectiveness of additional rate cuts, particularly without an IMF program in place, given the deterioration in the country's public finances. From RGE Monitor
On the Emerging Markets Monitor, Walter Molano compares how the former Soviet States have weathered this financial storm relative to Turkey. Don’t miss Overview: Eastern Promises.
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EU & Turkey
Turkey and the European Union (potential membership)
Does Turkey need the EU?
- Maybe Turkey doesn’t need the EU as much as Eastern European countries did. Example – Poland, which sits between 2 great powers (Germany, Russia) on the Northern European Plains. Joining Germany inside the EU is an institutional way to remove the historical threat of war. Turkey does not lie in between two great powers that each have a history of invading it. Instead, Turkey in it’s own right has been a great power. It is in the Balkan states (former Yugoslavia), Romania and Bulgaria… where you find countries in the Borderlands.. Caught between Turkey, Russia and the West…
Summary of events:
- Applied for full membership: 1987
- Confirmed as candidate: December 1999
- Negotiations started: October 2005
- Turkey met the last condition for accession talks in July 2005, when it extended a customs union with the EU to all new member states, including Cyprus.
- However, it failed to ratify the customs union and its ports and airports remain closed to Cypriot traffic. The EU responded, in December 2006, by freezing accession talks in eight policy areas.
- In December 2009 EU governments reaffirmed the freeze, saying it would "have a continuous effect on the overall progress in the negotiations".
- "Turkey has not made progress towards normalisation of its relations with the Republic of Cyprus," they said, calling for progress "without further delay".
- So far only 13 of the 33 areas of negotiation - called "chapters" - have been opened.
- Turkey's EU negotiations have been overshadowed by concerns about freedom of speech and democracy in Turkey, treatment of religious minorities, women's and children's rights, civilian control of the military and the Cyprus tensions.
- The European Commission has called on Turkey to strengthen democracy and human rights, underlining the need for deeper judicial reform.
- The EU has welcomed Ankara's moves to improve Kurdish rights and its efforts to normalise ties with neighbouring Armenia.
- The EU also welcomed the Yes vote in a Turkish referendum in September 2010, which gave the ruling AK Party the go-ahead to change the military-era constitution and bring it more into line with EU norms.
- France's President Nicolas Sarkozy and a number of other senior politicians in the EU want Turkey to have a partnership deal with the EU, rather than full membership.
- Some politicians worry that such a large, mainly Muslim country would change the whole character of the EU, while others point to the young labour force that Turkey could provide for an ageing Europe.
- The UK Foreign Office says it expects Turkey to be ready for membership "in a decade or so".
- source: Turkey country profile
read more about European Union - enlargement from GloboTrends here
Politics
2010:
- party in power: "In 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power. This was a defining moment because the AKP was not simply a secular Europeanist party. Its exact views are hotly debated, with many inside and outside of Turkey claiming that its formal moderation hides a hidden radical-Islamist agenda" Read more: Geopolitical Journey, Part 5: Turkey | STRATFOR
- opposition secularist party: the People’s Republican Party (CHP)
Oil & Turkey:
On the RGE Analyst’s EconoMonitor, Jelena Vukotic analyzes the nexus between Turkey’s EU membership bid and its strategic importance for advancing European energy security. She points out that Turkey is geographically well positioned to become a regional energy hub, critical for the increasingly hungry European markets. Yet, without a clear signal from the EU that Turkey will be joining the bloc, Ankara will be reluctant to put EU energy security interests above other considerations and will shift its focus to its own pressing energy needs. Read Turkey’s EU Dreams and European Energy Security: In the Pipeline?
Source EIA
GeoPolitics & the Future:
Turkey will be a great power in the next 50 years or so. I’m comfortable with my long-term prediction, but the next decade will be a period of transition for Turkey, from being one of the countries confronting the Soviets under the U.S. alliance system to being a resurgent power in its own right. It will be no one’s pawn, and it will be asserting its interests beyond its borders. Indeed, as its power increases in the Balkans, Turkey will be one of the forces that countries like Romania ....
Read more: Geopolitical Journey, Part 2: Borderlands | STRATFOR
History:
"Turkey’s evolution is framed by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the creation of modern Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk’s task was to retain the core of the Ottoman Empire as an independent state. That core was Asia Minor and the European side of the Bosporus. For Ataturk, the first step was contraction, abandoning any attempt to hold the Ottoman regions that surrounded Turkey. The second step was to break the hold of Ottoman culture on Turkey itself. The last decades of the Ottoman Empire were painful to Turks, who saw themselves decline because of the unwillingness of the Ottoman regime to modernize at a pace that kept up with the rest of Europe. The slaughter of World War I did more than destroy the Ottoman Empire. It shook its confidence in itself and its traditions."... Read more: Geopolitical Journey, Part 5: Turkey | STRATFOR
History & the military:
"Ataturk sought to guarantee the survival of the secular state through the military. For Ataturk, the military represented the most modern element of Turkish society and could serve two functions. It could drive Turkish modernization and protect the regime against those who would try to resurrect the Ottoman state and its Islamic character. Ataturk wanted to do something else — to move away from the multinational nature of the Ottoman Empire. Ataturk compressed Turkey to its core and shed authority and responsibility beyond its borders. Following Ataturk’s death, for example, Turkey managed to avoid involvement in World War II.".....Read more: Geopolitical Journey, Part 5: Turkey | STRATFOR
GeoPolitics
Ever since the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Turkey has had a secular government. The secularism of the government was guaranteed constitutionally by the military, whose role it was to protect the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — the founder of modern, secular Turkey, who used the army as an instrument of nation-building. The Turkish public, in contrast, runs the gamut from ultrasecularists to radical Islamists.
from a geopolitical perspective, Turkey is always in an uncomfortable place. Asia Minor is the pivot of Eurasia. It is the land bridge between Asia and Europe, the northern frontier of the Arab world and the southern frontier of the Caucasus. Its influence spreads outward toward the Balkans, Russia, Central Asia, the Arab world and Iran. Alternatively, Turkey is the target of forces emanating from all of these directions. Add to this its control of the Bosporus, which makes Turkey the interface between the Mediterranean and Black Sea, and the complexity of Turkey’s position becomes clear: Turkey is always either under pressure from its neighbors or pressuring its neighbors. It is perpetually be ing drawn outward in multiple directions, even into the eastern Mediterranean.
From the army’s point of view, the Ottoman Empire was a disaster that entangled Turkey into the catastrophe of Word War I. One of Ataturk’s solutions involved not only contracting Turkey after the war, but containing it in such a way that it could not be drawn into the extreme risk of imperial adventure.
In World War II, both Axis and Allies wooed and subverted Turkey. But the country managed — with difficulty — to maintain neutrality, thereby avoiding another national catastrophe.
During the Cold War, Turkey’s position was equally difficult. Facing Soviet pressure from the north, the Turks had to ally themselves with the United States and NATO. Turkey possessed something the Soviets desperately wanted: the Bosporus, which would have given the Soviet navy unimpeded access to the Mediterranean. Naturally, the Turks could not do anything about their geography, nor could they cede the Bosporus to the Soviets without sacrificing their independence. But neither could they protect it by themselves. Thus, left with only the choice of NATO membership, the Turks joined the Western alliance.
There was a high degree of national unity on this subject. Whatever the ideologies involved, the Soviets were viewed as a direct threat to Turkey. Therefore, using NATO and the United States to help guarantee Turkish territorial integrity was ultimately something around which a consensus could form. NATO membership, of course, led to complications, as these things always do.
To counter the American relationship with Turkey (and with Iran, which also blocked Soviet southward movement), the Soviets developed a strategy of alliances — and subversion — of Arab countries. First Egypt, then Syria, Iraq and other countries came under Soviet influence between the 1950s and 1970s. Turkey found itself in a vise between the Soviets and Iraq and Syria. And with Egypt — with its Soviet weapons and advisers — also in the Soviet orbit, Turkey’s southern frontier was seriously threatened.
Turkey had two possible responses to this situation. One was to build up its military and economy to take advantage of its mountainous geography and deter attack. For this, Turkey needed the United States. The second option was to create cooperative relations with other countries in the region that were hostile to both the Soviets and the left-wing Arab regimes. The two countries that fit this bill were Israel and pre-1979 Iran under the shah. Iran tied down Iraq. Israel tied down Syria and Egypt. In effect, these two countries neutralized the threat of Soviet pressure from the south.
Thus was born the Turkish relationship with Israel. Both countries belonged to the American anti-Soviet alliance system and therefore had a general common interest in conditions in the eastern Mediterranean. Both countries also had a common interest in containing Syria. From the standpoint of the Turkish army, and therefore the Turkish government, a close collaboration with Israel made perfect sense.
Read more from: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090202_erdogans_outburst_and_future_turkish_state
Turkey: "An Islamic Power":
Along with Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran and Egypt, Turkey is one of only five major powers in the Islamic world with enough economic and military potential to affect anything beyond their immediate neighbors. Indonesia and Pakistan are internally fragmented and struggling to hold together; their potential is largely bottled up. Iran is in a long-term confrontation with the United States and must use all of its strength in dealing with that relationship, limiting its options for expansion. Egypt is internally crippled by its regime and economy, and without significant internal evolutions it cannot project power.
Turkey, on the other hand, is now the world’s 17th-largest economy. It boasts a gross domestic product (GDP) that is larger than that of every other Muslim country, including Saudi Arabia; larger than that of every EU country other than Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands; and nearly five times larger than that of Israel. In per capita GDP, Turkey ranks much lower on the global scale, but national power — the total weight a country can bring to bear on the international system — frequently depends more on the total size of the economy than on per capita income. (Consider China, which has a per capita income less than half that of Turkey’s.) Turkey is surrounded by instability in the Arab world, in the Caucasus and in the Balkans. But it is the most stable and dynamic economy in its region and, after Israel, has the most effective armed forces.
Read more from: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090202_erdogans_outburst_and_future_turkish_state
Places in Turkey:
Istanbul:
Think Finance, culture, European influence
Izmir
Izmir is Turkey's third largest city and second most important port with almost 20% of the national exports being serviced by the seaport. The yearly loading capacity is expected to reach 11 million tons by the year 2005. For airborne travel, the regional airport is one of the most modern international airports in Turkey, and offers international and domestic services. The city airport, Adnan Menderes (ADB), is one of the biggest in the country and accommodates several international airline companies and most European charter flights.
Another asset for multinationals in Izmir is the Aegean Free Zone; the most successful free zone in Turkey with a trade volume of 1,2 billion dollars. It is located 4 km from the International Airport and 12 km from the Port of Izmir. It is the only production-oriented free zone in Turkey representing major industries such as electronics, automotive, high technology products, food and packaging, textiles and machinery.
Companies which have decided to invest in Izmir include General Motors, Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, Citibank, FTC/Lockheed, Delphi, Samsung, Hugo Boss, Akzo Nobel and ABB of Sweden.
Ankara
The capital of Turkey, Ankara is located in the center of the country providing a gateway from Europe into Asia. An International airport connects the city with most countries as well as with other Turkish cities such as Izmir and Istanbul.
Overseas firms with operations in Ankara include Agilient, Cisco Systems, Computer Associates, IBM, Motorola, Oracle and Raytheon.
Web censorship in Turkey:
2010: "Turkey lifts its ban on YouTube"
2008: "It doesn’t take much to get your Website banned in Turkey. Pretty much any complaint to a lower court can get a Website blocked in the country. Websites including YouTube, DailyMotion, Alibaba, Slide.com, and some Wordpress blogs have all been banned, usually because of some purported slight to the Turkish government or Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
External Links
Library of Congress: Country Studies
Excellent source of historical information about a country; "The Country Studies Series presents a description and analysis of the historical setting and the social, economic, political, and national security systems and institutions of countries throughout the world.
Other wikis:
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