Distributive Politics and Regional Development: Assessing the Territorial Distribution of Turkey’s Public Investment
研究分析了2005至2012年间土耳其81个省份的公共投资分配，发现政治因素虽影响投资流向核心选区，但社会经济因素仍是主要决定因素，且投资集中于较发达地区，反映了官僚机构追求效率的策略。
Turkey is often perceived as a country with low bureaucratic capacity and prone to political manipulation and ‘pork-barrel’. This article tests whether this is the case, by analysing the extent to which politics, rather than equity and efficiency criteria, have determined the geographical allocation of public investment across the 81 provinces of Turkey between 2005 and 2012. The results show that although the Turkish government has indeed channelled public expenditures to reward its core constituencies, socioeconomic factors remained the most relevant predictors of investment. Moreover, in contrast to official regional development policy principles, we uncover the concentration of public investment in areas with comparatively higher levels of development. We interpret this as the state bureaucracy’s intentional strategy of focussing on efficiency by concentrating resources on ‘the better off among the most in need’.