Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced Wednesday a comprehensive plan to boost Turkey’s economy through wide-ranging structural reforms in various sectors, including trade, energy and health.
Addressing a press conference jointly held with nine cabinet ministers at Ankara Palace, Davutoglu said “the main goal is to boost efficiency, improve human resource capacity, guarantee predictability and increase accountability.”
The reform plan, which was presented by Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan to the cabinet on November 3, would be composed of nine packages with 25 prioritized structural reforms, World Bulletin reported.
The premier said Turkey was beginning a new economic period with the reforms that would boost the country’s economy. A government committee would also monitor the plan for its efficient implementation.
1- Decreasing Import
The first package of the reform program would reduce dependence on imports by 2018, which at the moment is almost $100 billion more than the country’s exports. “Our aim is to scale up the rate of exports meeting imports to 70 percent until 2018,” Davutoglu explained.
He added the government was planning to increase Turkey’s GDP to $1.3 trillion by 2018 from $820 billion in 2013. Also, a reduction in the current account deficit from 7.9 percent to 5.2 percent is on the cards. The government aims to eventually lower the unemployment rate from 9.8 to 7 percent with its reform plan.
2 - Commercialization
The second part of the transformation package aims to commercialize innovation and research and development efforts to create new brands, and intermediate or final products that are competitive internationally.
3 - Development and Production
Davutoglu says this part of the program aims to increase the share of domestic firms in public tenders, which constitutes around seven percent of the nearly 105 billion Turkish lira ($46b) GDP of Turkey as of 2015.
4- Energy production based on domestic resources
The fourth program of the action plan stipulates reduction of foreign dependence in energy production and focuses more on domestic resources.
5- Energy Efficiency
This part of the program aims to reduce Turkey’s energy density from $0.26 to $0.24, which means consumed amount of energy to create one unit of the GDP and reduce government building energy consumption to 10 percent until 2018 by increasing productivity.
6- Agriculture
The Turkish premier said the efficient management and use of Turkey’s water resources in agriculture were vital for sustainable development and food safety.
7- Healthcare
He said incentives would be given to small and medium enterprises involved in health industries.
8- Health Tourism
This aims to increase hospital bed capacities in Turkey’s health tourism sector to 100,000 beds. Also, the goal is to have over 750,000 foreign patients in a year and earn $5.6 billion revenue in a year.
9- Transportation to Logistics
This part of the program is designed to strengthen the country’s international position in the logistics sector, reduce the burden of logistics cost in the total cost of industrial products and shorten the transport time of the country’s products to consumer markets.
Apart from the nine areas announced in detail, there are still other programs which will be implemented, he said.
