If you can guarantee profits without adding any value simply by building things, you won't risk investments in technology.

PwC Consulting announced its list of global top 100 companies, ranked by market capitalization. Here are three observations for you concerning the list: first, there are no companies from Turkey on it. The 100^th company on the list has a market capitalization of $70 billion, compared to the $20 billion of Turkey’s largest company. Second, between 2008 and 2013, newcomers constituted one third of the list, climbing up in market capitalization. There is no such dynamism in Turkey. The companies from Turkey on the Forbes 2000 list are predominatly holdings and banks from the 1950s. Third, from 2008 to 2013, manufacturing industry companies that concentrate on new technologies improved their positions whereas Turkey continued to compete with yesterday’s global giants. Just take a look at the preferred sectors in Turkey: network services such as oil, and electricity distribution and/or production sectors. These are the very sectors that fell out of the top 100 between 2008 and 2013.

Turkey’s economy is competing with the yesterday of the global economy. It is unable to keep up with the times. Forget about quarreling with its past, Turkey is unable to design its future. Why is that? Why is Turkey unable to take the time to reinvigorate its economic structure? I have a couple of ideas. If you are interested, please read on.

After I saw the PwC’s list, I checked the countries of origin of the global top 100 companies. There were 22 of them. On the list, the US, which with a bag of tricks claims to be in big trouble, takes the lead. The number of American companies on the list increased from 35 in 2008 to 43 in 2013. The US was followed by European countries, with a total of 23 companies as of 2013, including the UK, compared to 36 in 2008. Obviously, Europe is still in trouble. The remaining one-third comes from emerging countries. Eight of the total 22 countries with companies on the list are developing countries including Korea, Taiwan, China, Mexico, and Brazil.

But there are no companies from Turkey on the list. I took it a step further and checked the Forbes 2000 list. Turkey has 14 companies on it, half of them giants from the 1950s. Other than those are Ford Automotives, Turkish Airlines, and Turkish Telecommunication. Not that all are in sectors that lose altitude on the global scale. In addition are the GSM company Turkcell and food retailer BİM. Even these two are old sectors for the global economy. I feel sad about this.

How do more and more businesspeople from Turkey make it to the billionaires list whereas Turkish companies trail behind in global rankings? The answer is quite simple: A country that does not have a solid justice system where everyone can claim their rights cannot have large companies either. In Turkey, there is no point in tying your entire wealth to a single company, putting all your profits under registry. It is the state we are talking about. If it runs into trouble, it levies a retrospective tax, as was done during Çiller’s prime ministry. Ask any businessman in Anatolia, he will say the state is temperamental. No large company can flourish in a country where citizens are not able to seek their rights before the law. A solid justice system is required.

Why does Turkey tussle with yesterday’s rivals instead of turning towards future technologies? A country cannot even imagine tomorrow’s technologies if the highest income its physicists can earn is by teaching at private university preparation courses. Tomorrow’s technologies cannot flourish in a country that does not know what to do with its basic sciences graduates. Nor it can imagine how competition will take shape in the existing sectors. No, not with the indecisiveness which led to five education ministers in one decade.

Why do Turkey’s companies fail to regenerate swiftly? Why have the largest companies remained the same since I was a baby? If you can guarantee profits without adding any value simply by building things, you won't risk investments in technology. If you have the means to build a plaza on an empty parcel of land, you will not bother with investing in technology. Turkey wasted the 1990s going after interest rent. Then came the second era of the rentier economy. We are still occupied with it. We have no time to work on new technologies, and we won't until land profits are taxed.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 27.09.2013