Abstract:

The European Union (EU) is an integration of countries with a high level of income and prosperity. To objectives such as price stability, balance of payments, improvement of living conditions, high employment, balanced public spending, stable and balanced growth, the economic policies of the Member States need to be coordinated. In this study, in the process from 2008 to 2017, the economic indicators in the Maastricht Criteria were discussed Inflation, Interest, Budget Gap/GDP, Public Debt/GDP variables and the situation of Turkey’s proximity to the current 28 EU countries. First, the countries of the EU and Turkey were compared according to the macroeconomic indicators specified in the Maastricht Criteria, and the countries that showed similarities were grouped by aggregation analysis. In the process of membership of Turkey to the EU, the time-based assessment of the economic situation has been worked with panel data in order to not ignore the change according to the years. Therefore, the state of close-up of countries in homogeneous groups obtained by aggregation analysis has been studied by panel data unit root analysis. The analysis of the assembly made with the 2008-2017 data average results were achieved in three sets. Turkey is in the group that includes Denmark, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Romania, Poland, Finland, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Luxembourg and Estonia. As a result of the approximation analysis, the approximation has been observed in general according to the variables indicated in each group of countries.