Burhan Can Karahasan

The Economic Costs of Separatist Terrorism in Turkey

Turkey has been suffering from separatist terrorism and the political conflict it implies since the mid-1980s, both of which are believed to have a negative impact on economic welfare. This article investigates the economic costs of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorism, particularly in the Eastern and Southeastern provinces of Turkey by invoking the synthetic control method. We create a synthetic control group that mimics the socioeconomic characteristics of the provinces exposed to terrorism before the PKK terrorism emerged in the mid-1980s. We then compare the real gross domestic product (GDP) of the synthetic provinces without terrorism to the actual provinces with terrorism for the period 1975 to 2001. Causal inference is carried out by comparing the real per capita GDP gap between the synthetic and actual provinces against the intensity of PKK terrorist activity. Extended over a period of fourteen years (1988 to 2001), we find that after the emergence of terrorism, the per capita real GDP in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia declined by about 6.6 percent relative to a comparable synthetic Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia without terrorism.

Thirty Years of Conflict and Economic Growth in Turkey: A Synthetic Control Approach

This study seeks to estimate the economic effects of PKK terrorism in Turkey in a causal framework. We create a synthetic control group that reproduces the Turkish real per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) before PKK terrorism emerged in the second half of the 1980s. We compare the GDP of the synthetic Turkey without terrorism to the actual Turkey with terrorism for the period 1955-2008. Covering the period of 1988-2008, we find that the Turkish per capita GDP would have been higher by an average of about

Self-Rated Health and Endogenous Selection Into Primary Care

1,585 per year had it not been exposed to PKK terrorism. This translates into an average of 13.8 percent higher per capita GDP or a 0.62 percentage points higher annual growth over a period of 21 years. Our estimate is robust to country exclusion, sparse controls, various non-outcome characteristics as predictors of GDP, alternative specifications of the in-space placebo experiments and to other potentially confounding interventions to the sample units in the pre-terrorism period.

Spatial Structure and Spatial Dynamics of Regional Incomes in Greece

This study assesses the causal effects of primary care utilization on subjective health status in Turkey using individual-level data from the 2012 Health Research Survey. Employing recursive bivariate ordered models that take into account the possibility that selection into healthcare might be correlated with the respondents self-reported health status, we find that selection into primary care is endogenously determined and that the utilization of primary care significantly improves self-rated health after controlling for sociodemographics, socioeconomic status, health behaviors and risk factors, and access to healthcare. We show that the causal association between healthcare utilization and health status is robust to the use of objective measures of health and specific types of care, suggesting that the use of a single-item question on self-rated health and binary measures of preventive care utilization is valid.

DYNAMICS OF REGIONAL NEW FIRM FORMATION IN TURKEY

This chapter offers a detailed analysis of spatial asymmetries and dynamics in Greece over the long period. It finds a general picture of weak spatial associations (‘spatial randomness’), underpinned by a number of disconcerting patterns: a trend of increasingly localised spatial disparities; a single-cluster formation (‘hotspot’) around Athens and the south Aegean islands; a significant role of space (‘neighbourliness’) for determining regional convergence and divergence; and, most importantly, the emergence of two antithetical trends in spatial association during the period of financialisation in the country (intensifying associations in the Athens cluster and increasing spatial randomness outside this). We claim that understanding these patterns and trends is paramount for designing appropriate policies for sustainable and spatially equitable growth in the country in its post-crisis environment.