Turkey

Modern Turkey was founded in 1923 from the Anatolian remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire by national hero Mustafa KEMAL, who was later honored with the title Ataturk or "Father of the Turks." Under his authoritarian leadership, the country adopted wide-ranging social, legal, and political reforms. After a period of one-party rule, an experiment with multi-party politics led to the 1950 election victory of the opposition Democratic Party and the peaceful transfer of power. Since then, Turkish political parties have multiplied, but democracy has been fractured by periods of instability and intermittent military coups (1960, 1971, 1980), which in each case eventually resulted in a return of political power to civilians. In 1997, the military again helped engineer the ouster - popularly dubbed a "post-modern coup" - of the then Islamic-oriented government. Turkey intervened militarily on Cyprus in 1974 to prevent a Greek takeover of the island and has since acted as patron state to the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus," which only Turkey recognizes. A separatist insurgency begun in 1984 by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) - now known as the People's Congress of Kurdistan or Kongra-Gel (KGK) - has dominated the Turkish military's attention and claimed more than 30,000 lives. After the capture of the group's leader in 1999, the insurgents largely withdrew from Turkey mainly to northern Iraq. In 2004, KGK announced an end to its ceasefire and attacks attributed to the KGK increased. Turkey joined the UN in 1945 and in 1952 it became a member of NATO; it holds a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council during 2009-10. In 1964, Turkey became an associate member of the European Community. Over the past decade, it has undertaken many reforms to strengthen its democracy and economy; it began accession membership talks with the European Union in 2005.
==Economical characteristics==
* Currency: Turkish lira (ISO code: TRY)
* Central bank discount rate: 15% (22 December 2009)
* Commercial banks lending rate: NA%
* Stock of money (M1): $37.1 billion (31 December 2009)
* Quasi money (with M1 makes M2): $313.5 billion (31 December 2009)
===Statistics===
Statistic / Year 	1999 	2000 	2001 	2002 	2003 	2004 	2005 	2006 	2007 	2008
GDP (million USD)World Bank. "Turkey: GDP", from World Bank Data. Referenced 2010-09-30. 	248 961	267 209	196 036	232 745	304 594	393 038	483 992	529 932	647 846	734 853
Govt. debt (% of GDP)World Bank. "Turkey: government debt", from World Bank Data. Referenced 2010-09-30. 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	51.500 	44.352 	44.509
Govt. revenue (% of GDP)World Bank. "Turkey: government revenue", from World Bank Data. Referenced 2010-09-30. 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	24.997 	25.837 	22.559
Govt. expenses (% of GDP)World Bank. "Turkey: government expenses", from World Bank Data. Referenced 2010-09-30.	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	22.151 	24.546 	22.827
Debt to revenue (years) 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	2.060 	1.717 	1.973
==References==
Note: statistical data was rounded. Different sources may use different methodologies for their estimates. Debt to revenue is calculated by dividing the two variables from their original ('unrounded') values. It represents how long it would a government take to repay its entire debt if it used its whole revenue for this purpose.
==External links==
* Turkey on Wikipedia
* Central bank of Turkey
* Country profile (pdf) from the Enterprise Studies page (part of the The World Bank Group)
* Studies from the Library of Congress (1986-1998)
* BBC country profile
Category:Countries