THE IMPACTS OF SOCIOECONOMIC FACTORS ON MIGRATION ACROSS TURKISH REGIONS: A SPATIAL DATA ANALYSIS

Abstract

When examining the causes of migration in Turkey, it can be seen that low quality health and education services, imbalanced urbanization, security problem, high level unemployment rate have pivotal role on migration. In the 1950s Turkey, with intensified migration to big cities (mostly to West part of the country), urbanization process has accelerated. This process brought a number of problems with itself.
Although many studies have been performed by researchers about migration in Turkey, there is no paper which includes spatial analysis. In this manner, this study purpose to examine the impacts of the factors as unemployment rate, Socio-economic Development Index on migration and their spatial analysis dimensions.
To test spatial dimensions of the variables, we perform an exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) on migration and other variables among provinces of Turkey. While our choropleth maps indicate that the some part of the country is significantly more developed than the others, the tools of spatial statistics reveal the presence of spatial dependence across provinces. The presence of heterogeneity is reflected in the distribution of LISA statistics. Overall, our results shed new light on the distribution of migration and its relation with the others among provinces across Turkey.