Regional development trap in Turkey: Can relatedness find a way out?

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between related and unrelated variety and regional development traps in 26 NUTS 2 regions across Turkey from 2014 to 2021. We propose two unique measures, DT1 and DT2, for these traps based on deviations from EU and emerging market nations. Our findings suggest a notable negative correlation between related variety and DT1, implying that increasing related variety could potentially mitigate the risk of falling into development traps. Furthermore, DT1 appeared to be more reliable than DT2 in accurately representing the risk of regional development traps, particularly in countries experiencing high growth deviations, like Turkey.