With its membership talks with the EU to begin this autumn, its privatisation drive in full swing and its economy continuing to grow at a blistering pace, Turkey is on the verge of attracting large amounts of foreign investment for the first time, economists and bankers say. For a country of its size, Turkey has been an underachiever at pulling in direct foreign investment (FDI) over the past five decades.
Turkey has a population of more than 72 million people – the third-largest in Europe after Russia and Germany – and is expected to surpass Germany in the next 10 years. It has the youngest population on the continent with 45% of its inhabitants under the age of 25. Yet it attracted only $20.7bn in FDI between 1954 to 2004, according to the State Institute of Statistics (DIE). That amount was less than half the foreign investment inflows to China alone in 2003, according to the UN’s Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad).
