WHY DOES TURKEY FAIL AS A NEW ENTRANT ON ECONOMIC CITIZENSHIP MARKET?

Authors : Mustafa Akin

Pages : 55-67

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Publication Date : 2019-06-26

Article Type : Research

Abstract :Economic citizenship is the fast track to a legal second passport in a short period by investment or donation. Recently, many countries including Turkey have launched their own citizenship by investment program or economic citizenship. This paper explains the failure of Turkish economic citizenship schema and weighs the cost-benefit analysis of economic citizenship in three aspects: visa free, marginal contribution and investment threshold aspects. There are 3 reasons of failures to attract foreign investors to economic citizenship: First, the return on investment is very low since one often needs to apply for the EU visa and 6 big English-speaking countries. Second, under the marginal contribution analysis, we eliminated the redundancy among passports and we calculated the additional benefits of a passport. Schengen visa free access passport is the main condition of this citizenship market. Third, under the investment analysis, Turkey began with 3 million USD deposit requests or 1 million USD real estate purchase above European (U.K., Cyprus, Portugal and Bulgaria) countries’ threshold.  
Keywords : Economic Citizenship, Turkey, Visa Free Countries, Investment, Schengen