A.A. Gulumser

Measuring Regional Creative Capacity: A Literature Review for Rural-Specific Approaches

Recent theories on regional creative capacity often focus on urban regions without taking into account rural regions. In addition, the application of such analyses to rural regions may lead to misrepresentation or misunderstanding of rural creative capacity. Against this background, the aim of the present study is to integrate the existing literature on different components of creative capacity, namely, knowledge, innovation, entrepreneurship and networks, in order to build a more comprehensive framework for rural creative capacity and its evaluation. In the light of the perspective from the empirical literature review on the evaluation of creative capacity in rural regions, various empirical measurements seem to misrepresent or underestimate the creative capacity of rural regions. Therefore, there is a clear need to use the locality in relation to its dynamics, i.e. tacit knowledge, cultural heritage and social and physical environment as the main and basic measurement unit for creative capacity analysis.

Changing Trends in Rural Self-Employment in Europe and Turkey

This study evaluates rural self-employment in the EU countries, while comparing them with self-employment in Turkey. The study focuses on self-employment trends in the agricultural sector on the basis of changing motivations and participations of males and females. The data used for comparison and evaluation are based on Eurostat and Turkstat data. The results show that agricultural employment and self-employment exhibit a slight decrease over time and that the impact of this decrease in male and female employment differs among countries. The results also show that the motivation of Turkish women towards self-employment is higher than that of European women and of Turkish men.