Measuring pro-poor growth in Turkey

Abstract

This study aims to answer to the question of whether the growth process in Turkey has been pro-poor for the 2003-2014 period. Towards this end, we first introduce the concept of pro-poor growth and then, we present four ways of measuring pro-poor growth, namely pro-poor growth index (Kakwani and Pernia, 2000), rate of pro-poor growth (Ravallion and Chen, 2003), poverty growth curve (Son, 2004), and poverty equivalent growth rate (Kakwani and Son, 2008). We apply these measures to Turkey by utilizing household budget surveys conducted by Turkish Statistical Institution. We found that growth has been pro-poor in absolute sense for most of the yearly periods. In terms of relative approach, we made varied conclusions even for the same year based on the usage of different poverty measures. However, there is one striking finding that ultra-poor people has gained less from growth when compared to less poor people. Lastly, we decomposed the change in poverty into growth and redistribution components and we found that the main factor of the change in poverty has been derived by the growth component and the effect of growth gets higher if we use PGI and SPGI to measure poverty. Besides, in terms of redistribution, the results suggest that redistribution has hurt the ultra-poor people most compared to less poor people.