The key challenge is to enrich the people and strengthen the middle class. Without a strong middle class, Turkey cannot become a high-income country.

When I was born, we had a refrigerator in the house. Dad later told me that they had bought the AEG refrigerator after I was born. We also had a telephone, which remained as a rare necessity for a long time in Turkey. People used to make an effort to get a phone line connected to their houses. Back then, you had to connect separately to the line via the operator for each toll call. It was not possible to just dial and call. It wasn’t until the 1970s that we had a TV at home. The broadcast was not 24/7 and it was black and white. But it cheered us up big time. That was the first time I watched the Star Trek. In the second half of the 1970s, I indistinctly remember struggling to buy our first car. It was rather easy to add an automobile to our life. We did not know about the Internet. Neither were there iPhones or iPads. Do you see how the symbols of status have been changing? Nowadays I am obsessed with the idea that the size of the middle class in a country can be measured on the basis of car ownership. Let me tell you why I care about it.

I thought about this when I read a story from the Chiense Xhinhua news agency. It was on a Chinese teenager aged 17, who sold his kidney for iPhone and iPad. He made a deal with a broker in a chat room on the Internet and sold his one kidney for 22,000 Yuans (approximately $3500). Now he has been hospitalized for renal failure. In China, almost 1.5 million people are in line for organ transplants and such incidents are not rare. By the way, the surgeons who performed the transplant were arrested. The story added that iPhones and iPads were the most important symbols of status in China nowadays. In Turkey, it was fixed phones in the 1960s and TVs in the 1970s. But I feel that the case with cars as a symbol of status is quite different. Actually, it is amazing to see how the middle sector in Turkey has been developing by watching the rise in car ownership. In order to buy a car, you have to save a much bigger amount of money compared to other status symbols such as the iPhone or iPad. Owning a car is not as easy as owning an iPhone or an iPad. It is sort of an investment. If you have a car, you can enjoy a different level of mobility. By the way, I am referring to all motor vehicles, automobiles, minibuses, and autobuses.

In the 1960s, there were 4 motor vehicles per 1000 people in Turkey. In the 1970s, this number increased to 10. In 2003, there were 96 cars per every 1000 people. Turgut Özal’s reforms had increased the number of motor vehicles per 1000 people. The latest figure I accessed was for 2009: the number of motor vehicles per 1000 people had increased to 142. Turkey ranks 82^nd among 146 countries in terms of number of motor vehicles in proportion to its population. In the 1960s, the numbers of motor vehicles per 1000 people was 2 in Korea, 4 in Thailand, 10 in Greece and 14 in Spain. These countries have outperformed Turkey in enriching their populations. The figures for motor vehicle ownership by 2009 were 379 in Korea, 165 in Thailand, 451 in Greece and 608 in Spain. Poland increased this figure from 6 in the 1960s to 508 in 2009. In short, some countries have performed better than Turkey in enriching their people while some others which were in the same position as Turkey performed worse than we did. And all of those that Turkey outperformed were countries in our region: in Egypt the number of motor vehicles per 1000 people increased from 4 in 1060 to 43 in 2009. In Syria, the figures increased from 6 to 63, and in Pakistan from 2 to 13. The figures for the latter two have remained unchanged over the last decade. All of the laggards have undemocratic regimes while the leaders are generally democratic countries. Korea is an exception, as it usually is.

So, what can I say? There are two types of countries: those that are able to enrich their people and those that are not. Or those that are able to strengthen the middle class and those that are not. Turkey radically changed the economic structure between 1980 and 2009. It successfully turned from a closed agricultural economy into a medium-technology, exporter industrial country. It has not been as successful in enriching the people, however. It has failed to enhance their skill capacity. The key challenge for the next decade is to enrich the people and strengthen the middle class. Without a strong middle class, Turkey cannot become a high-income country. Turkey has to enrich its human capital. Let me note it down here.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 29.06.2012