Role of investment incentives in removal of regional imbalances and convergence analysis as success criteria: The Turkish case

Gerni, Cevat (Dogus Author)Together with starting to observe the situations like the development differences seen between the countries after industrial revolution between the cities and regions of the countries. This situation leads some of the cities to emigrate and some other cities to become more crowded. The negative externalities emerging in migrationreceiving cities make the life in those cities intolerable, whilst the decreasing population of emigrant cities triggers the decrease in both of demand and supply that is a production factor. The reflection of this situation shows itself as the cycle of “migration-revenue decrease-migration”. Through the investment incentives given to underdeveloped regions in order to prevent the migration that is a reflection of regional imbalances, it is aimed to decrease the imbalances by increasing the employment and revenue. The incentives applied in the year after statistical region classification in Turkey consist of incentives in periods of 2004-2008 and 2009-2012. In this study, it has been examined if there is any convergence between the income per capita in city and region axes, and if the incentives have any influence on this convergence. The investment incentives prepared in accordance with the realities of the cities eliminate the development differences by creating more efficient results. As a policy argument, it can be asserted that the incentive implementations considering the comparative superiorities of the cities will play more important roles in both of ensuring the efficient use of the resources and closing the development differences