Regional Inequalities among NUTS Level-1 Regions and Solution Efforts of Turkey

Regional development and regional planning subjects are very closely linked with the development projects in Turkey as much as in the world. The main applications and studies are usually based on the elimination of disparities among regions. Within this framework, this study has firstly aimed to set out the regional development objectives in Turkey. Secondly, we tried to find out the effect of new regional approaches on Turkish regional structure. Hence, as an approach different from other studies, we focused on NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) regions instead of geographical units (regions) studies. In the following parts of the study, thirdly, the efforts of Turkey about the regional development have been discussed and assessed by using Neoclassic Growth Model in terms of per capita income distributions for new region groups. To compare the results of analysis among regional units, the most important development projects for Turkey were also taken as a different approach unlike other sudies. Previous studies based on geographic regions showed that the basic tendency of per capita income distribution is 'Divergence' unlike expected 'Convergence' in Turkey, but in our study, we found more optimistic results for Turkey, in which per capita income distributions have a tendency to converge after 1997.