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President Gul: Turkey has lot to do in democracy, development

Türkiye Materials 27 June 2013 12:20 (UTC +04:00)
President Gul: Turkey has lot to do in democracy, development
President Gul: Turkey has lot to do in democracy, development

Turkey still needs to cover a lot of ground to match up to developed countries in terms of democracy and economic standing, President Abdullah Gul admitted on Wednesday Todays` s Zaman reported

"When we compare ourselves to developed countries, we see clearly that Turkey still needs to make further progress," he said at a meeting in İstanbul.

Gul stressed during his opening speech at the Operational Research and Industrial Engineering 33rd National Congress that Turkey owes its impressive reform process and economic performance over the past 10 years to political stability.

Noting that Turkey has grown by five times in the past 10 years, Gul made it clear that Turkey needs to carry on with its reform process as the country still has a lot to do to catch up with developed countries. "It's for this reason that Turkey will continue carrying out this process of radical reforms. The most precious thing that we have at hand [to achieve that] is of course political stability," Gul said, maintaining that the main reason for the current crisis in European Union countries is the inability to carry out the necessary decisions.

In 2023, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic, Turkey aims to be a developed country and to achieve that, the president emphasized, "we need to keep a very macro outlook," noting that thanks to extensive reforms carried out in the past decade, the Turkish economy has been resistant to shocks, domestic and external, in the past few years.

The congress was organized by the US-based Institute of Industrial Engineers, which is international in nature. Aside from Gul, Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan also attended the opening session of the three-day long congress. Five hundred presentations will be given by participants from 39 countries at the congress which has been held in a country other than the US for the first time this year.

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