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The employment policy is one of the most disputable areas between Turkey and the EU. The EU declared two opening conditions, one about union rights and the other one about preparing an action plan displaying step by step the transposing of EU laws. Although Turkey claims that she met those criteria, the EU insists on keeping the accession negotiations in this area closed. However, there is serious gap between Turkish and European employment policies and in order to comply with the EU’s, there is a strong need of enthusiasm in Turkey for proper implementation of changes made in legal and institutional structures. Simultaneously, the EU has to offer a considerable incentive, e.g. membership, for Turkey to encourage her to adapt EU rules in employment policy. Unfortunately, it is argued in this paper that the current situation is the opposite, i.e. there is no substantial incentive from the EU to encourage Turkey and thus, no enthusiasm from Turkey to comply with the EU policy. In order to analyze the impact of the EU on Turkey’s employment policy the main question designed in this paper is: ‘To what extent does the EU have influence on policy convergence in a candidate country that does not have a clear membership perspective? ‘. It is argued in this study that “without a concrete incentive, European Union’s impact on a candidate country would be limited”.  Thus, the patterns of policy change at the national level are the dependent variable to be observed. The European Union’s conditionality is the independent variable that is expected to alter the national patterns.

Conditionality is mostly defined as the EU policy engendered for candidate countries. However, the mere use of conditionality by the EU does not essentially explain transferring of policies and EU rules towards the candidate countries. EU conditionality may be considered as a comprising approach but in certain policy areas or countries it might not be as successful as it was on other ones. The EU conditionality basically defined as a bargaining policy of affecting through reward, under which the EU provides inducements to candidate or neighbor countries to aligning with the conditions of the EU. In this study the explanatory power of conditionality would be questioned; so the main question will be “to what extent does the EU have influence on policy convergence in a candidate country that does not have a clear membership perspective? Taxation chapter in accession negotiations between Turkey and the EU has been chosen as the case of this research as providing to have an answer on this question. The main objective of this paper is ‘analyzing the extent of EU conditionality on Turkish taxation policy.’ Furthermore, it is argued in this study that “without a concrete incentive, European Union’s impact on a candidate country would be limited.”