THE STATUS OF TURKEY AS A CANDIDATE COUNTRY FOR MEMBERSHIP IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: A COMPARISON USING LOGIT ANALYSIS

In the past few years Turkey has made great progress to meet the Copenhagen political criteria in the process of starting negotiations for full membership in the European Union (EU). The EU Commission Report, which was released on October 6, 2004, recommends that negotiations with Turkey should start, and most European leaders agree with that recommendation. Aside from the fears related to religious and cultural differences that exist in Europe, the Maastricht economic criteria will certainly play an important role during the negotiation process. In this study, we use Logit analysis to investigate the likelihood of candidate countries for full membership in the EU. In estimating the models, we classify the candidate and member countries as of 2003, and compare the actual classification with the one predicted by the estimated model, and investigate Turkey’s position and ability for full membership. The results of the Logit analysis suggest that Turkey’s likelihood of membership in the EU is not promising. According to Logit analysis, Turkey ranks last among the candidate countries for possible full membership. However, most of the countries join the EU in May 2004 fail to qualify for membership even as of 2003. In particular, some of these countries ’ memberships probabilities are extremely low, ranging from circa zero to 4.5 percent, and not much different than that of Turkey. The result supports the view that the decision by the EU welcoming these countries to the club as full members is more of a political rather than economic nature. Finally, sensitivity analysis for Turkey reveals that the inflation and public deficit rates ought to be reduced to around 4-5 percents for any real likelihood of membership