TURKEY	2018
Population, million	81.4
GDP, current US$ billion	773.7
GDP per capita, current US$	9,505
Life Expectancy at Birth, years (2018)	76.0

Turkey’s economic and social development performance since 2000 has been impressive, leading to increased employment and incomes and making Turkey an uppermiddle-income country. However, growing economic vulnerabilities and a more challenging external environment are threatening to undermine those achievements. 

For most of the period since 2000, Turkey has maintained a long-term focus on implementing ambitious reforms in many areas, and government programs have targeted vulnerable groups and disadvantaged regions. Poverty incidence more than halved over 2002-15, and extreme poverty fell even faster. 

During this time, Turkey urbanized dramatically, maintained strong macroeconomic and fiscal policy frameworks, opened to foreign trade and finance, harmonized many laws and regulations with European Union (EU) standards, and greatly expanded access to public services. It also recovered well from the global crisis of 2008/09.

However, there has been a slowdown in reforms in several areas in recent years that, together with a number of economic vulnerabilities, risks reversing some of the progress made to date.

The economic outlook is subject to higher levels of uncertainty than usual, given rising inflation and unemployment, contracting investment, elevated corporate and financial sector vulnerabilities, and only patchy implementation of corrective policy actions and reforms.

There are also significant external headwinds due to weakening relationships with some key trading partners, ongoing geopolitical tensions in the subregion, global trade tensions, and concerns about a global recession.