Economic Complexity and Regional Growth in Turkey: Implications for East-West Disparity

ABSTRACT

Economic complexity has significant implications for regional imbalances in Turkey, given the pronounced economic differences between its eastern and western provinces. This study aims to provide evidence to support the hypothesis that economic complexity has a significant positive effect on regional growth and long-standing regional imbalances in Turkey prevent the eastern region from benefiting equally from the economic gains of rising complexity. Using annual export data from 2007 to 2020 we calculated economic fitness and economic complexity indexes for the provinces of Turkey. We demonstrate that both economic fitness and economic complexity indexes are important determinants of regional growth in Turkey.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic complexity
• economic fitness
• regional disparities
• regional growth
• regional inequalities

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• O18
• O47
• R11
• R58

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The related dataset can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21994745.v1

Notes

1. For a comprehensive view of economic complexity values at the country level, the relevant data can be accessed via the following link: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/atlas

2. The results of the estimation do not change, regarding the signs and statistical significance, when Ethnicity is estimated in Model 4 in Tables 2– 5, using the local election results calculated as the ratio of the number of municipalities won by Kurdish political party mayoral candidates to the total number of municipalities in each province. See Appendix 2 for the alternative Ethnicity data used.

3. Re-estimating the models reported in Tables 2– 5 using Pooled OLS, does not alter the significance or direction of the coefficients. The results for Pooled OLS can be found in Appendix 3.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

İ̇lhan Korkmaz

İ̇lhan Korkmaz is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences at Kütahya Dumlupınar University.

İ̇brahim Tuğrul Çınar

İ̇brahim Tuğrul Çınar is a research assistant, Ph.D. at the Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics, Anadolu University.

Tüzin Baycan

Tüzin Baycan is a professor at Istanbul Technical University in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Faculty of Architecture, and President of the Turkish National Committee for Regional Science.