For many years, Turkey has mistaken growth for development. However, the path to true development lies in production, industrialization, and creating value-added. The fundamental reasons behind today’s high inflation, external debt, and economic vulnerabilities lie in an economic mindset that has drifted away from production. As Atatürk pointed out years ago; the key to development is to establish an economic rationale that puts industry back at the center.
Şener GENÇER
Aegean Plastic Industrialists' Association (EGEPLASER)
Chairman of the Board
A sentence written on the wall of the Assembly Hall of the Aegean Region Chamber of Industry, where I have served as a Member of Parliament for over twenty years, always catches my eye…
It is a sentence by the founder of our Republic, our Great Leader Gazi Mustafa Kemal Atatürk:
“To develop means to industrialize.”
The words Development and Growth are still often confused with each other even today. Why, one might wonder, did our Atatürk not say “To grow means to industrialize”? I am talking about a contradiction that should still be puzzling all of us—industrialists, workers, the young, the old, the retired, and those without work.
There are certain indicators in economics that explain the country's future much more clearly than speeches in election squares. The share of industrial production in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is one of them. Because industrializing means high value-added, technology, qualified employment, exports, and economic independence.
At the beginning of the 2000s, the share of industry in Turkey's Gross Domestic Product was at the level of 28-30 percent, whereas today it has declined to 18 percent. Is it possible for a country that thinks more about opening shopping malls than building factories, that produces housing instead of machinery, and that says "I will import and use it" instead of developing high technology, to reach Atatürk's development goals?
WE WERE 19TH IN 1983
Unless Turkey produces high value-added goods, it can only increase its exports to a certain point.
The figures are proof of this. In short; how much we grow and how much we export is, of course, important. However, these figures are not enough to place us in the top ranks among indicators of development. Let us take this example: Turkey was the 19th largest economy in the world in 1983. Today, according to 2025 GDP figures, we are in 17th place.
The point we have reached in 43 years barely amounts to an inch of progress.
In contrast, we are 66th in per capita income, 45th in the human development index, 159th in press freedom, and 120th in freedom and democracy standards. These figures show us the difference between growing and developing in its most painful form...
CONCRETE ECONOMY
For many years, Turkey has followed an economic policy based on construction and consumption as a growth model. Housing is sold through credit expansion, consumption is pumped up with imported goods, and the economy is kept afloat with inflows of hot money. But the painful part of it is this:
Because industrial production does not grow sufficiently, the country struggles to earn foreign currency. When it cannot earn foreign currency, dependence on external debt increases. As external debt increases, the economy becomes more fragile. In other words, this deindustrialization is partly at the root of the spiral of high exchange rates, high inflation, and high interest rates that we are experiencing today.
When the crises Turkey has experienced in the last 35 years are examined, it is understood that the root causes are always moving away from production and failing to create value-added. We always experience the same problems, we always apply the same solutions, and we always expect different results. The only upside to the deep economic crisis we have fallen into for the last year should be that we realize these truths.
For this, there is no need to look far. We will take lessons from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and proceed on the path of reason and science. We will produce, we will create value-added, we will get rid of the obsession with burying money in concrete, and we will set a new education policy that focuses on vocational training.
Turkey needs to return to a production-oriented development model. The industrialist should not be seen merely as a taxpayer, but as an actor that creates strategic value. Today, energy costs, problems in accessing finance, the pressure of high interest rates, and currency instability experienced in Organized Industrial Zones are leaving many producers breathless.
Turkey needs an economic rationale that puts industry back at the center.
This content has been translated using artificial intelligence technology.