An Empirical Analysis of Cultural Economy in Turkey’s Metropolitan Regions

Abstract

Since 20th century, culture has been counted among one of the major contributors to economic growth and development. As a concept with three dimensions as social, political and economics, it has been taking increasing attention especially in regional economics. Numerous books, reports and studies on cultural economy have been published worldwide, but in comparison with them, the Turkish literature on cultural economics is still quite inadequate. This study contributes to the literature by applying a three-star analysis for three large metropolitan areas of Turkey and this paper aims to analyze clustering potentials of cultural activities in three large Turkish metropolitan areas. The empirical results reported in this paper imply that cultural industries in Istanbul and Ankara have more intense cultural clusters than Izmir. In addition, while Istanbul and Ankara have the same numbers of mature cultural clusters, Istanbul has a bigger potential for cultural clusters compared to Ankara.