The Comparison of Productivity Growth in the EU and Turkey : The Possible Impact of the Membership

The main aim of this paper is to compare and analyse the performance of total factor productivity (TFP) in the European Union (EU) countries and Turkey over the period 1975-1997. This study also investigates the possible impact of membership on productivity in Turkey by evaluating the performance of the new member countries, namely, Greece, Portugal, and Spain, before and after their membership.We use data envelopment analysis (DEA) to compute Malmquist productivity indices decomposed into two components, namely, efficiency change and technical change. The results revealed that Turkey had a relatively lower performance on average compared to the EU countries. The new member countries had better performance in productivity that is mainly explained by technological improvement