Adaptation process for European economic policy: A comparison between Turkey and Poland

Turkey's European Union negotiations have been spoken for a long time, but it is still an open-ended problem. Turkey has always been compared with the countries that had been accepted as members of the European Union and although the deficiencies have been tried to complete, the transition to the full membership has not taken place. This study will compare the structure of Turkey, whose membership negotiations are still on going, with the economic structure of Poland, which was accepted as a full member in 2004. While examining the economic structures of these two countries, the macroeconomic indicators that European Union considers within the economic criteria will be compared. These indicators in question are inflation rate, employment rate, export rate, GNP growth rate, GDP per capita growth rate, import ratio, net income from abroad, exchange rate, unemployment rate. In addition, as a second step, clustering analysis will be conducted to compare the economies of these two countries. While similar variables are used in the cluster analysis, the data belonging to 11 countries which were accepted as full members of the European Union since 2004 and the data of 5 countries which are still in the negotiation phase will be used. These countries are Poland, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Turkey, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Albania. Clustering analysis will be performed in SPSS program by using 9 macroeconomic variables belonging to 17 countries for 1980-2015 period. At the end of the clustering analysis, the similarity of these 17 countries will be assessed in terms of economics. When we look at the analyzes of the given periods, the Turkish economy and the Poland economy are partly similar. Except for the period of 1980-2004, that is, as a result of positive changes in the Turkish economy after years 2004, Turkey and Poland have emerged in similar clusters. When we evaluate this work in general, we have obtained the result that Turkey and Poland show similarity in part of their economic situation. It has also been observed that the countries with the full membership of the EU in the period concerned have a similar economic structure with Turkey. Keywords: European Union (EU) Economic Criteria, Poland, Turkey, Cluster Analyst.