Common agricultural policy of the European Union and convergence of member states' agricultural policies: The case of Poland

The beginning of official relations between the European Union and Turkey dates back to 1959, when Turkey applied for an association agreement and the parties signed Ankara Agreement in 1963 which came into force in 1964. At the Helsinki Summit of the European Union in 1999, The EU officially recognized Turkey as a candidate state and confirmed that the same criteria would be applied to Turkey as it applied to the other candidate countries. Finally the EU has started accession negotiations with Turkey on 3 October 2005. The candidate state needs to fulfil EU acquis of 35 chapters including agriculture and rural development which are key importance to Turkey in terms of social and economic aspects.In this study, firstly, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) will be examined in the context of its structure, implementation and its historical evolution and developments. The CAP has had a dynamic structure and thus changed since its establishment. The CAP has had enormous impacts on both agricultural polices of EU member states and candidate states. The primary objective of this study is to analyse the convergence per capita agricultural income among 25 EU member states. Then it will move on to examine total factor productivity (TFP) process among EU countries and its relation with convergence process. In addition the selected countries is divided into two groups as new (EU 10) and old EU states (EU15), in order to obtain a framework in which the experiences of old and new members would be applied for the Turkish case in the accession negotiations process. A cluster analysis is used to find an appropriate EU state to compare the Turkish case with the aim of obtaining some suggestions from the experience of the former.It should be born in mind that Turkey is different from the EU member states in terms of the size of agricultural sector and the total numbers employed in the sector. However, the EU state which has similar features in agriculture sector would provide some suggestions for Turkey in the negotiation process. Under these considerations Poland would be an appropriative case for this thesis