| Summary: | This essay tries to analyse Turkey’s position and constraints in the WTO Nonagricultural Market Access Negotiations (NAMA) especially vis-à-vis developing countries.It basically, underlines Turkey’s unique negotiating position; de jure developing, de facto an advanced economy status in the WTO Doha NAMA negotiations.At Doha Ministerial Meeting in 2001, WTO members agreed to initiate negotiations to further liberalize trade, among other areas, on non-agricultural goods. For this purpose, the Negotiating Group on Market Access (NGMA) was created at the first meeting of the Trade Negotiations Committee of the WTO, in early 2002. Turkey has been quite active since then in NAMA negotiations in calibrating its position between offensive and defensive negotiation interests although its offensive market access interests largely outweigh defensive one.Turkey has also been propagating an offensive non-linear tariff cutting Swiss Formula approach at the WTO to curb the international high tariffs, tariff peaks and escalations. Having a strong offensive market access interests, Turkey mainly aims at large developing country markets diversifying its trade portfolio away from traditional markets towards large developing economies.From the perspective of governance, Turkey has serious constraints on its trade and industry policy space stemming from the Turkey-EU Customs Union (CU). Although Turkey is a de jure developing country in the WTO and will have all legal rights and mobligations stemming from the outcome of the DOHA, in practice, Turkey will have to implement the same applied common external tariffs of the EU. Despite the constraints and dilemmas stemming from the EU-Turkey customs union, it can be strongly argued that, it is in Turkey’s industrial interests to be actively involved in the WTO to tackle the high tariffs, tariff peaks and escalations which hinders Turkey’s exports to the world markets.
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