The New Investment Incentive Package and the Other Turkey
09 April 2012
The new investment incentive package was announced at the beginning of April. According to the initial reflections in the media, everyone is quite content with it. I would be too, if I was an investor here. It seems that the incentive experts of the Ministry of Economy have designed a smart incentive bill that will please investors as much as possible. I don’t think it would have been possible to satisfy this wide an array of demands and views from as many sectors more successfully. We have to congratulate the Ministry. So far so good. But can the new incentive package fulfill its aim of eliminating regional development disparities?
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The annual cost of keeping women at home is $574 billion
02 April 2012
Those of you who watched TV in the 90s might have come across a show called Sliders. It’s about a group of people who travel across parallel universes, each with its own alternate version of reality. They come across worlds in which the Germans won World War II or the planet is threatened by a giant meteor. In one episode women are the dominant gender and Hillary Clinton is the president of the United States. It’s important not to get caught up in “what ifs,” but sometimes this kind of thinking can shed light on the consequences of our decisions. From a development point of view, it pays to ask what kind of country we would be living in if we had taken different steps in the last three decades.
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The European Union has to be Turkey’s Growth Story
19 March 2012
Ever more of us nowadays think that the crisis in Europe has shaken the foundations of Turkey’s European Union (EU) project. Looking at the acceleration of the trade figures between Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa, some get caught up in the notion that the region might be an alternative to the EU as a partner for Turkey. I personally feel sorry for those who think that the EU is breaking down and that Turkey has an alternative. I have always thought that the EU was the only thing that could transform Turkey positively in the twenty-first century, just as the Republican project transformed it in the twentieth. This idea of has been strengthened lately.
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What if Mark Zuckerberg joined the army in Turkey?
22 February 2012
If Mark Zuckerberg had not been born in New York but in Istanbul, he would now probably be brooding over when and how to fulfill his mandatory military service. In a previous commentary [1], I tried to portray how the Turkish entrepreneurship ecosystem is far from offering young people opportunities similar to those that Zuckerberg enjoyed in the US. I see now that I missed one important element: mandatory military service.
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Why the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world don’t live in Turkey
06 February 2012
Facebook is about to go public. The company’s value is estimated at $100 billion and the personal wealth of its 27 year-old founder, Mark Zuckerberg, at $27 billion. Facebook is ten times as valuable as Turkey’s biggest company, Tüpraş, and Zuckerberg’s personal wealth is three times the total wealth of the richest Turkish family.
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The five differences between the ministries of education in Turkey and the UK
23 January 2012
I actually wanted to continue writing on the issue of sidewalks as we are buried in snow. The municipal mentality that plows the snow on the roads does not care much about the sidewalks where pedestrians walk. But I will cover this in a later commentary. I am now sure that we have no respect for citizens who want to walk on sidewalks. But does the government respect citizens who want to surf the Internet? Today, I want to share some of my observations as an average Internet user.
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Are women in our cities not working because of insufficient subway systems?
09 January 2012
There is a debate we have missed out on due to the tumultuous agenda of the week: The Mayor of the Istanbul, Kadir Topbaş, said that the dolmuş (a shared transportation system where the rate is paid by the distance traveled) will gradually be retired from city traffic. On the day this remark was made, a few news channels asked the opinion of regular people on the streets but then the matter was completely forgotten. This, however, is an issue of great importance on Turkey’s path to becoming a normal country.
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North vs. South Korea - Eastern vs. Western Turkey?
26 December 2011
When I heard about the death knell of North Korean leader Kim Jong, it took me a second to even remember that there was a country named North Korea. 25 million people apparently live in this country. We in Turkey are naturally interested in South Korea, located in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula with a population of 49 million people. We admire that country’s economic performance over the past few decades and compare it to that of Turkey.
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How can Turkey become world’s 10th largest economy with these pavements?
12 December 2011
I spent the last week in three different cities: three days in Istanbul, two days in Paris and two days in Ankara. Lately, whenever I leave Ankara, questions about city planning run through my mind. The biggest question I had after the two days in Paris was, “If Paris is a city, what is Ankara?”
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Turkey in between Arab Countries and South Korea: A picture of mediocrity?
28 November 2011
If I was to draw a picture worth a thousand words, it would be the graph below. It shows per capita income in Turkey, Arab countries and in South Korea in proportion to that of the US, the largest economy in the world. It starts in 1980 (the year of my birth) when a Turk, an Arab and a South Korean had the same per capita income, which was one-fifth of an American’s. By 2010, income per capita in proportion to that of the US increased to 70 percent in Korea, 30 percent in Turkey and dropped to 19 percent in Arab countries.
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