How to Situate the Turkish Economy among the European Union Economies? An Exploratory Analysis

This paper aims to study the proximity of the Turkish economy relatively to the European ones. The purpose is twofold. First, to study the European Union (EU) economies and distinguish different groups identified on the basis of different economic variables. Second, to project the Turkish and other candidate economies on the groups previously defined and quantify distances between these and the EU economies. The study is based on a large set of economic variables. We characterize countries according not only to nominal criteria but also to different economic variables describing the structure and growth dynamics of the economies. The methodology used is an exploratory analysis based on a stochastic algorithm, the Kohonen algorithm, which allows to visualize the proximity of the countries and use cross-country time-series data (1980 onwards), hence to study the eventual convergence of Turkey and other candidate countries to the European groups.