Turkey: The Benefits/Costs of Rapid Economic Growth

The Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies (EDAM), a Turkish think tank, has just released a very interesting paper that looks at the benefits and costs of Turkey's ambitious economic goals, which aim to have the country among the world's top ten by 2023, and places them in a global context. The paper, written by Prof. Jean-Pierre Lehmann, takes a close look at the potential social costs of the kind of growth Turkey would need to reach its goals. From his paper:

Turkey is a middle-income country. Still, with 8.2% of the population living on less than $2 a day and 27% below the national poverty line, clearly Turks stand to benefit considerably from growth – so long of course as the fruits of growth are shared with the poor.
And that is one of the many nubs of growth. The process of growth has its downsides and the outcomes are by no means obviously equitable.
On an occasion of visiting a chip factory in Korea in the mid-1980s, I was told that the young female workers (aged 16 to 19) worked 14 hours a day, 28 days a month. This comes to roughly 98 hours a week – considerably more than the working hours in Turkey which range, I am told, from 49 to 59 per week.
The point is this: no country has succeeded in achieving growth without exploiting its workforce and polluting the atmosphere. In many cases, there has also been widespread destruction of nature. Japan’s high economic growth during the “miracle years” resulted in possibly the worse case ever of mercury poisoning, causing what became known as the Minamata disease; while the pristine beauty of the Inland Sea (among other sites I was fortunate to visit before the “miracle”), which had served as a source of inspiration for generations of Japanese poets, was forever destroyed for future generations by the installation of petro-chemical plants.
This is not to say that it is impossible to achieve high growth without exploiting labour – whether one’s own or migrant labour – or causing pollution, but it is to say that there are not many models from which one can draw. Countries that are achieving sustainable growth, for example in Scandinavia or Switzerland, are ones that have already industrialised and in any case whose growth rates are much more moderate – at a third or less of the Turkish goal of 8%.