Abstract
The aim of the present article is to investigate the economic determinants of
the synchronization across regional business cycles in Turkey between 1975
and 2010. The vast majority of studies in this field have concentrated on
well-known determinants, such as inter-regional trade, financial integration,
and industrial specialization, while largely ignoring spatial and
geographical factors, including differences across regions in agglomeration,
localization economies, market size, and urbanization. In this article, we
incorporate these variables into our analysis and evaluate their roles in the
comovement of regional business cycles. Our findings indicate two major
results: first, low degree of synchronization during 1975-2000 has switched
to relatively more correlated and synchronously moving regional cycles during
2004-2010. Second, having tested the variety of determinants, we find that
the pairs of regions that have more similar industrial structure and market
size, trade integration, and arbitrary degree of agglomeration and
urbanization tend to synchronize more. Significance of these variables is
robustly evident regardless of the time period analyzed and of the type of
methodology employed.
Citation
ID:
218744
Ref Key:
engin2015panoeconomicusdynamics