Measuring Social Sustainability of NUTS-1 Level Regions in Turkey

Yağmur Kara and Aylin Köne
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Yağmur Kara: Muğla Sıtkı Kocman University, Department of International Trade and Finance

No 235, EY International Congress on Economics II (EYC2015), November 5-6, 2015, Ankara, Turkey from Ekonomik Yaklasim Association

Abstract: While the concept of sustainable development generally refers to achieving a balance among the environmental, economic, and social pillars of sustainability, the social pillar has had less attention than economic and environmental sustainability. However, in recent years, social sustainability has become an important concept for policy makers and scholars. The measurement and assessment of social sustainability is also gaining importance in this context. The objective of this study is to develop a tool in order to measure social sustainability of Turkish regions for NUTS-1 level and examine each region’s social sustainability performance. To this aim, an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model is proposed since AHP is an efficient tool for integrating indicators with different units of measurement. SuperDecisions software v.2.4.0 was used for the analysis and the model is applied to 12 NUTS-1 regions for the 2008-2013 period. NUTS-1 regions were ranked according to a set of six criteria namely, education, health, poverty, unemployment, safety and illiterate women. The results indicate that regions have shown relatively low performance between 2008 and 2011. However in 2012 and 2013 all regions got highest social sustainability performance scores. TRB (Ortadoğu Anadolu), TR3 (Ege), TR7 (Orta Anadolu), TR8 (Batı Karadeniz) and TR9 (Doğu Karadeniz) regions got scores of highest social sustainability in 2012 and TR1 (İstanbul), TR2 (Batı Marmara), TR4 (Doğu Marmara), TR5 (Batı Anadolu) and TR6 (Akdeniz) in 2013. TRA (Kuzeydoğu Anadolu) region has shown the best social sustainability performance in 2008 and TRC (Güneydoğu Anadolu) region in 2011. None of the regions in 2009 and 2010 performed well compared to other years. Specifically in 2009 TRC (Güneydoğu Anadolu), TR2 (Batı Marmara), TR3 (Ege), TR4 (Doğu Marmara), TR5 (Batı Anadolu), TR6 (Akdeniz), TR7 (Orta Anadolu) have shown the lowest performances. In 2010 TRA (Kuzeydoğu Anadolu), TRB (Ortadoğu Anadolu), TR8 (Batı Karadeniz) and TR9 (Doğu Karadeniz) regions have shown the lowest performances.

Keywords: Sustainability; Social Sustainability; Regional Development; Analytic Hierarchy Process; Multicriteria Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C44 P25 P48 Q01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara and nep-cwa
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eyd:cp2015:235

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