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Turkey 's Development During The Twenty First Century

Better Essays

Frankie Wheeler

Professor Nagiel

ECO2013

26 March 2017

Turkey’s development in the twenty-first century has been nothing short of phenomenal. In the past fifteen years alone, the country has become known for supplying and manufacturing high quality consumer goods – with Turkey becoming the largest European manufacturer of television sets and light commercial vehicles, the eighth largest global producer of food, and being home to forty-three of the top 250 international construction firms ("Erdoganomics"). Turkey’s inflation rate, rarely dropping below forty percent in the twentieth century, has plunged downward, and the annual growth rate of the gross domestic product has regularly been in the area of five percent, only once …show more content…

There are explanations for Turkey’s recent negative growth and the slow growth coming before it. European economic woes, the Russian recession, the current situation in the Middle East – the European Union, Russia, and countries in the Middle being significant partners in trade – are factors negatively impacting Turkey that are outside of it’s control ("Erdoganomics"). A major domestic cause is last summer’s attempt at a coup d’état that the economy still hasn’t recovered from. Recent spats with the Netherlands, Germany, and Russia, and security concerns (more recently, Istanbul and Turkish Airlines being among the cities and airlines included on Trump’s “laptop ban”), have damaged confidence in the Turkish economy (Khan, Turkish unemployment rises). Excessive regulations primarily targeting businesses have been particularly anti-productive, making it much more difficult for small businesses to grow larger in size or efficiency. As a result, Turkey is ranked 131st out of 144 countries according to labour market efficiency by the World Economic Forum ("Erdoganomics"). Most economists agree that poor growth, if substantial economic reform isn’t implemented, will continue to be normal.

The lira, Turkey’s official currency, had a great start in 2017. It finished February as

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