Measuring Human Development Index and Sub-Indices for Turkish Provinces

The relation between economic growth and development is one of the main discussion topics of the development economics. There are some arguments claiming that economic growth indicators are not proper tools to measure differences among countries in terms of quality of life, happiness, sustainability, capabilities and capacities. In order to fix this problem several measurement and analysis techniques are proposed. Human development index, which is one of the simple yet effective tools, has become prominent in international fora in this regard. United Nations Development Program’s human development index (HDI) compares countries in terms of development, poverty, gender equality, income inequality, etc. since 1990. As the index enables comprehensive analyses by using a few variables, it could be used not only for comparing countries but also measuring the development levels of different provinces within a country. This study calculates city-level human development index and sub-indexes by using 2014 data for Turkey. Moreover, relations between sub-indexes and human development index are analyzed. As a conclusion, it is observed that human development indexes on the West is higher than on the East part of Turkey. In addition, a statistically strong and meaningful relationship was found between the HDI and income and education sub-indices