Minister Bolat: Türkiye has now risen to the league of high-income countries

Trade Minister Ömer Bolat attended the opening ceremony of Istanbul Gelişim University's Academic Year. In addition to Minister Bolat, Gelişim University Rector Bahri Şahin, Chairman of the Board of Trustees Abdulkadir Gayretli, academics, and numerous other attendees attended the event.

"WE ARE IN THE TOP 10 IN THE WORLD IN INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS"

Minister of Trade Ömer Bolat stated, "We have all witnessed our President's major reforms and resource allocations to provide the best quality services in the world for our citizens, especially in the fields of education and health. I would like to give an example from the 2026 budget alone. Our budget expenditure item is planned as 18.9 trillion lira. The budget allocated to education is a full 2.9 trillion lira for primary, secondary, high school, and higher education. 15.4 percent of our 18.9 trillion lira expenditure budget has been allocated, and this has always been around 15-16 percent for the last 20 years. Another important area is health. 3.3 trillion lira has been allocated for health expenditure. This includes the expenditure to be made by the social trust institution, our universities, state hospitals, and city hospitals. This constitutes 17.5 percent of the total budget expenditure. 33 percent of the total budget is allocated to education and health expenditures, programs, and policies. Turkey has now become a center in the field of international education. In 2002, 5,000 "While we had students abroad, this number has now risen to 375,000 international students. These young people are contributing $3 billion to our country's education tourism sector. We are currently among the top 10 in the world in terms of international students. This demonstrates that Türkiye is a center of attraction in the field of education," he said.

'Türkiye HAS NOW RISEN TO THE LEAGUE OF HIGH-INCOME COUNTRIES'

Minister Bolat said, "We increased our nominal national income, which was $238 billion in 2002, to $1 trillion 358 billion by the end of last year and to $1 trillion 474 billion by the end of July. We will have a national income exceeding $1.5 trillion annually. Turkey has now risen to the league of high-income countries. As Turkey, we grew by an average of 5.3 percent between 2002 and 2024. We grew 1.8 points above the world average. The world's average growth rate was 3.5 percent between 2002 and 2024. In 22 years, we had the 21st largest economy in the world in nominal terms. As of last year, we became the 17th largest economy. This year, God willing, we will improve this figure. And according to purchasing power parity, while we were the 16th largest economy in the world in 2022, we became the 12th economy last year. And this was a six-fold growth in dollar terms. It rose from $638 to $15,325 in dollar terms by the end of last year. As of the end of June, at the end of the first half of this year, we are at $16,400. And hopefully, we will close the year at $17,000. Our medium-term program targets for 2028 are $1.9 trillion in national income and at least $21,000 in per capita national income. Thankfully, we achieved 4.8 percent growth in the second quarter of this year and 3.6 percent growth in the first half of the year. Among European countries, our export growth rate was particularly high. We had a 4.1 percent increase in exports in the first nine months. Due to the increase in imports, especially in automobiles and other goods, we saw a 5.9 percent increase in imports. However, our foreign trade balance was $67 billion in the first nine months. We will try to close this to around $90 billion by the end of the year. We were a country that exported $36 billion in goods. Currently, we have $270 billion in annual exports, a 7.5-fold increase. We used to export $14 billion in services. This has now increased our service exports to $119 billion on an annual basis. Our President set a total export target of $390 billion in goods and services at the beginning of the year. As of September, we reached our $390 billion export target. Last year, we increased net exports of goods by $6.2 billion. This year, we increased our net exports of goods by $8 billion in nine months. And we have a total increase in exports of goods and services by $15 billion. Our current account deficit was $55 billion in May 2023 due to the explosion in energy and food prices caused by the Russo-Ukrainian War and the increase in imports. We closed the year with $40 billion. We closed 2024 with $10.5 billion. And we reduced the share of our national income to only 0.8 percent. Our need for external borrowing has decreased. This has not put pressure on the exchange rate. We aim to close this year with a current account deficit of between $21 and $22 billion. Annualized service "We have already surpassed $390 billion in exports, including goods exports. The pleasing thing is that the share of our medium-high and high-technology exports increased by 42.6 percent this year," he said.

'Our total exports from technology parks have reached 15 billion dollars'

Minister Bolat said, "The IT sector. Turkey is making a great stride here as well. Our IT exports, which were $224 million in 2003, reached $5.3 billion last year. This was a 23-24 fold increase. This year, we will exceed $6 billion. We also made a great leap in R&D. The share of R&D in national income was 0.52 percent. Last year, it was 1.46 percent. This year, God willing, we will be around 1.55 percent. In R&D expenditures, there was an almost 75 percent increase in our last year's budget. From the state budget of 651 billion lira, budgets were allocated to R&D through TÜBİTAK. We did not have a single technopark in Turkey. Now, we have 113 technoparks. 93 of them are active and the others are in the establishment stage. And there are 12,076 companies in these areas. There are 124,000 R&D personnel working in technoparks, 70,000 projects have been completed, 17,000 500 projects are ongoing. We have 2,404 patents, 621 utility models, and 513 industrial designs. Our total exports from technology parks have reached $15 billion. Turkey's manufacturing industry is 25 percent higher today than it was in 2019. Germany's is 13 percent lower than it was in 2019. Italy and France are 1-2 percent lower. We've increased by 25 percent. Between 2020 and 2024, we grew by 5.4 percent annually, while the world grew by 2.8 percent. This is the only way we can achieve development and maintain our global competitiveness," he said.

Following his speech, Minister Bolat was presented with a gift, followed by a commemorative photo.

DHA

Reporter: News Center