Cyprus-Forum.com

[Viewpoint]

No more than wishful speculation, you people are handicapped do you realize this, you are incapable of making an unbiased assesment of Turkey...you have been getting it wrong for years...according to your past assesments Turkey should have evaporated by now but no shes still around going strong...what does that make you doom and gloom merchants look like? real stupid.

[Demonax]

Turkey’s economy, development and legal system - an unbiased assessment:

Artificial reform

But how much has Turkey really changed, and is it really on course to achieve its ambition of becoming one of the world’s ten largest economies? Certainly, the old gecekondu, shanty neighborhoods that used to encrust the hills along the Ankara airport highway, have been bulldozed and concreted over with what will soon be a gleaming new city. But for the other half of the journey, the new grandeur pasted onto buildings along the highway is literally skin-deep, a Potemkin illusion of red brick facades designed to please the eyes of foreign dignitaries and investors speeding into town.

Indeed it is easy to forget that the great Turkish boom was from an artificially low base and depended significantly on a European underpinning. Three quarters of foreign investment still comes from EU member states, with which Turkey still does half of its trade. Turkey’s opportunities in the Middle East have crashed after the past two years of violence in the region. Beyond its borders with Iran, Iraq and Syria, the situation now offers more risk than opportunity.

Most damaging of all for Turkey’s long-term prospects of a solo catch-up with Europe, however, is a failure to keep up its reform agenda. Ankara’s first wave of laws created with EU membership in mind did just enough between 1999 and 2004 to “sufficiently” meet the EU’s Copenhagen criteria for democratic politics and market economics. But the second wave never materialized, leaving the country’s judicial, education and taxation system caught in the old mire of inefficient top-down bureaucracy.

Blame for the stalled reforms can be shared between European Turkoskeptic politicians, Euroskeptic Turkish leaders, and quarrels over the divided island of Cyprus. But above all it is a Turkish political decision not to ratify the EU customs union with Cyprus and open its airports and seaports to Cypriot traffic that is directly or indirectly blocking half of its EU negotiating chapters. And Turkey’s substitution of homegrown ‘Ankara criteria’ for the Copenhagen ones has proved mostly rhetorical.

Turkey’s leaders need to take another look at how much they need an EU process with real benchmarks. The Economic Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2011 placed Turkey 88th as a “hybrid regime,” a category below “flawed democracy,” the same place it was in 2007. In 2011, Turkey came only 92nd in the UN’s Human Development Index, a rank unchanged since 2006. Recognition of intellectual achievements is meager, perhaps not surprising given that children still only spend an average of six and a half years in school. “Low proficiency” in English puts Turkey 32nd of 54 countries ranked by the 2012 EF English Proficiency Index.

The legal system is crying out for change. Outdated terrorism legislation meant that one third of all the world’s terrorism arrests made between 2001 and 2011 were in Turkey, including several thousand non-violent Kurdish activists placed in preventive detention. Turkey’s judiciary ranks at best 35th (for absence of corruption), and at worst 76th (for protecting fundamental rights), according to the World Justice Project’s 2012 Rule of Law Index. The Council of Europe reported in 2009 that Turkey’s prison population has doubled since 2006, with more than half being remand prisoners, resulting in jails that are overcrowded, tense, unhygienic and lacking out-of-cell activities.

Even economically, in 2013 Bloomberg only ranked Turkey as the seventh most attractive emerging market. Turkey’s vibrant commercial hub, Istanbul, took a laggard’s 74th place in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2012 ranking of global cities’ competitiveness. Far from rivaling the EU, average per capita income in Turkey is still half the EU average. Turkey’s much-vaunted goal to become the world’s tenth-largest economy by 2023 looks ambitious, given that Turkey’s 18th place in World Bank rankings in 2011 is not far from its 21st in 2003 and 22nd in 1993.

Istanbul, it is true, is now second favorite after Tokyo to host the 2020 Olympics—but Turkey’s sports record is hardly stellar, coming 50th out of 55 countries in the 2012 Olympics gold medal rankings. On the bright side, its regionally popular soap operas, along with Turkish Airlines being named Europe’s best airline by the World Airlines Awards in 2012, did push the country to 20th place in Monocle magazine’s annual look at global soft power. However, another survey did not find much to smile about: in 2011, Gallup found that Turkey was the seventh most unhappy country of 148 surveyed, in terms of people reporting recent anger, stress, worry, sadness or physical pain.

In a number of indexes, the stalling of Turkey’s EU reform process visibly coincides with a downward trend. Turkey is already responsible for the greatest number of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights; Russia now exceeds it in number of pending cases, but new cases referred from Turkey have doubled since 2008. Turkey was placed 154th in the 2013 Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index, compared to around 100th in the mid-2000s. The World Economic Forum’s 2012 Global Gender Gap Report ranks Turkey as the 124th-best country for discrimination against women, down from 105th in 2006.

http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_ar ... 013_485687

[Viewpoint]

You have been predicting this bubble bursting for the last 5 years, when will it actually happen? cause you all look real stupid.

G20 No sign of the GCs?

[Pyrpolizer]

You have been predicting this bubble bursting for the last 5 years, when will it actually happen? cause you all look real stupid.

G20 No sign of the GCs?

We are hiding inside the pants of Angela

And she farts, and farts, and farts at us

[bill cobbett]

These National Debt clocks are fun... well, if we can't laugh at the debts we'd all be crying...

This is the one for Turkey which needs 1,400 TL to service the debt every... OMG! ... every single second!...

http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/debtclock/turkey

[Viewpoint]

Look at your own country bill;

http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/debtc ... tedkingdom

An look at the debt per citizen in south Cyprus... that population figure is a bit dodgy to say the least.


Interest per year:

1,025,831,607€

Population:

1,117,000

GDP:

20,466,529,378€
Interest per second:

33€

Citizen's Share:

13,515€

Debt as % of GDP:

73.76%

[Pyrpolizer]

And yet you VP rejected my proposal to establish a Federation between us the Great Great bankrupt states of Greece-Turkey-Cyprus to show them all what we are only good at.

[Viewpoint]

And yet you VP rejected my proposal to establish a Federation between us the Great Great bankrupt states of Greece-Turkey-Cyprus to show them all what we are only good at.

It appears to a worldwide illness right now, we cant even unite how do you expect to get these 3 to do it?

[Anippe]

I hate the turkish for Cyprus invasion but it true I like Istanbul morer then Athens. Sorry to my fellow Greeks

I have lived in 11 countries

fantastic projects in Istanbul

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=295886

[B25]

I hate the turkish for Cyprus invasion but it true I like Istanbul morer then Athens. Sorry to my fellow Greeks

I have lived in 11 countries

fantastic projects in Istanbul

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=295886

No such place as Istanbul it is called Constantinople you ignorant pig.