Turkey's neoliberal investment law deepens export dependency while eroding fiscal sovereignty and labor rights
Original framing: “Turkey floats new investment law including exporters' tax cut - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Turkey's current investment law echoes the 1980s structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF and World Bank, which prioritized export-led growth over domestic industrialization, leading to deindustrialization in many sectors. The law also resembles Latin American 'maquila' models, where tax incentives for exporters created enclaves of foreign-owned production with minimal local value addition or labor protections. Historically, such policies have deepened dependency on volatile global markets, as seen in Mexico's 1994 'Tequila Crisis' or Argentina's 2001 default.
Turkey's new investment law exemplifies the contradictions of neoliberal globalization, where short-term capital inflows are prioritized over structural resilience, deepening the country's historical dependency on volatile export markets.
The law's framing by Reuters obscures how it entrenches power asymmetries between transnational capital and domestic labor, while erasing alternatives like indigenous cooperative models or green industrialization. Historically, such policies have led to crises (e.g., 1994, 2018), yet the law doubles down on extractive growth, ignoring evidence that public investment in R&D or worker co-ownership yields higher returns. The marginalized—informal workers, women, and Kurdish regions—bear the brunt of this model, while fiscal sovereignty is sacrificed to attract footloose capital. A systemic solution requires dismantling the law's export fetishism and replacing it with policies that democratize ownership, prioritize ecological limits, and center marginalized voices in economic governance.