Comparison of production structures of Turkey and European Union member countries by the methods of input-output analysis and similarity tests

The relationships of goods manufacturer and services provider sectors with the other sectors and final demand of a country, are the main determining factors of this country's actual and targeted economic sturucture. Therefore, the analysis considers interaction of all sectors (instead of concentrating on a single sector and/or sector group) would be more integrated and comprehensive. Since interdependencies and interactions of the sectors have taken into account by Input-Output analysis, it allows to realize most detailed structural analysis. Turkish economy have been analyzed by means of direct, total and partial linkage coefficients in the thesis by using year 2002 Input-Output table. Turkey and European Union member 22 countries have been compared by means of 33-sector aggregated Input-Output tables, thereafter key sectors of those countries have been defined. Turkish economy has 11 key sectors according to the Hirschman definiton. On the other hand, there are five key sectors in Turkish economy by Rasmussen definiton. Although Turkish economy shows similarity with the EU countries from the points of share of industry in total economic activities (even this share of Turkish economy is higher than most of the developed countries), technological structure of the Turkish economy takes place about the bottom rank among the EU countries. Production value chain of sectors, intersectoral interdependencies, the sectors must be given importance when other sectors developed, added value and progress of the value added chain concepts can be easily and precisely defined in sector based planning considers mutual interactions by the important coefficients approach employed in the thesis. The visual structures of the Turkish, German and Romanian economies have been obtained by using important coefficients approach. Furthermore, via a case study for textile industry, the sectors importantly take place added value chain in textile industry and sectoral interdependencies have shown as a flowchart. Leontief (Chenery-Watanabe version) similarity test, Wilcoxon test, Spearman correlation test, technology matrices correlations and important coefficient approach have been employed to investigate the structural similarities of the Turkish economy and EU member countries economies. Keywords 1. Input-Output Analysis 2. Structural Analysis 3. Sectoral Interactions 4. Structural Similarity 5. Important Coefficients Approach