The bath in question here is not of the kind brought to mind by a recent popular film with a similar title, but rather a deeper, broader (more historical?) one, the kind of bath which might even have appealed to good old Hegel himself: when learning to swim what you need is not a manual on swimming but a swimming pool. Or put another way, you can’t get into the water without getting wet.

And this is exactly what I seem to have done with my recent post on Turkey’s ‘economic miracle’, got myself extraordinarily ‘wet’. (Warning, this is a long post. It probably won’t make too much sense to you in any event, but it will make even less if you don’t read the original one :)).
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Leaving aside political considerations (I would certainly fast-track Turkey’s EU accession process for many, many reasons), the economic attraction of Turkey as an EU member state is rapidly making itself felt. Just look at these numbers from Morgan Stanley’s Cerhan Sevic:

According to our estimates, Turkey?s overall productivity growth accelerated from an average of 2.1% a year in the 1990s (or an average of 3% in the 1960-2000 period) to an average of 8.8% in the last three years. The trend growth rate also increased from 2.3% in the 1990s (and 3.1% in the 1960-2000 period) to 5.8% in the post-crisis era. The productivity acceleration is even more pronounced in the business sector. The rate of non-farm labour productivity growth rose to an average of 9.5% per annum in the last three years, from 2.2% in the 1990s and 2.4% in the 1980-2000 period. The underlying trend growth rate improved from 2.4% in the 1990s to 6.3% in the last three years and 7.4% this year. Moreover, according to the State Institute of Statistics? estimates, the average annualised rate of increase in real output per person in the manufacturing sector during the 2001-2004 period has been 10.2%, compared with 3.8% in the 1990s. In other words, output per worker in the manufacturing sector has increased by a cumulative rate of 30.4%, as the trend growth rate jumped to 7.5% in the last three years.

Now with everything appearing to be so wonderfully lacklustre all over the eurozone, you might have thought an economy with an underlying trend growth rate of 6.3% and rising would be worth taking very seriously indeed.

The other interesting point would be to ask why it is that Turkey is apparently so succesful, even in comparison to the other new EU accession states (and without all the aid). I would suspect that demography has something to do with it, but then I imagine most of you could already have guessed I was going to say that :).