Middle Income Trap, Trade Openness and Income Convergence: Evidence from Turkey

Abstract

According to World Bank country classifications by income level, Turkey has been a middle income country since 1955. In the first stage of the study, whether the situation faced by the Turkish economy is a middle–income trap or not was investigated by applying one traditional and three structural break unit root tests to the annual range of GDP per capita of Turkey relative to USA. The annual time series spanning from 1960 to 2020 was found to be not–stationary in all unit root tests except for one of the unit root tests which allow for a structural break. On the other hand, the ratio of Turkey's per capita GDP to the reference country's (USA) GDP remained in the range of 0.08 – 0.36, which was considered as the relative threshold throughout the period examined. Although the findings do not provide conclusive evidence for the existence of the middle–income trap, they indicate that Turkey is at risk of facing it. In the second stage of the study, the long– and short–run relationship between the convergence of Turkey and USA GDPs, and trade openness was investigated using annual data for the period 1990–2021. Exports and imports of manufacturing industries products and agricultural products as a percentage of GDP, the ratio of exports to imports, and the real effective exchange rate were included as explanatory variables in the ARDL bounds model applied. The findings reveal that increases in the level of trade openness in Turkey cause the per capita GDP of Turkey and the USA to converge in the long–run. While the increasing share of agricultural products imports in total GDP cause divergence in the long–run, increasing the share of manufacturing industry products imports cause divergence in both the long– and short–run.