Economic development and convergence in Turkey : a province-based assessment with a special emphasis on the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP)

Abstract

The first aim of this study is to investigate whether there are improvements in the development levels of the most developed, developed, and GAP provinces in Turkey, and also whether there exists convergence in labor productivity levels and the growth rates of productivity between the most developed, developed and GAP provinces in Turkey between the years 1975 and 2000. The second aim is to draw conclusions about whether the Southeastern Anatolia Project, designated as an integrated development project in the 1990s, has any positive effect on the convergence pattern of the cited provinces. This study shows that there is (beta) convergence in the labor productivity levels and the growth rates of the productivity of the sample consisting of the most developed, developed, and GAP provinces in Turkey. However, the development levels of the cited provinces regarding the Human Development Index and the mean years of the labor force's schooling do not change substantially over the time period 1975-2000. Although GAP causes an increase in the rate of the unconditional convergence in single cross-sectional regressions for the entire sample, it seems to have no positive effect on the convergence rate conditional on the human capital variable.|Keywords : Regional development, Income convergence, Human Development Index (HDI), Human capital, Mean years of the schooling.