Regional Inequality and Policy Targeting in Turkey: Implications from BSI Findings

Regional inequality policy typically asks one question: where is the gap largest? This paper argues that this question, while necessary, is insufficient. Drawing on firm-level sigma convergence analysis covering 22.85 million observations across 81 Turkish provinces (2006–2024), we show that the geography of current inequality and the geography of inequality trends are systematically different. The BSI decomposes inequality into a Level component and a Trend component, enabling simultaneous targeting of both dimensions. No single province functions as a national locomotive. These findings suggest that effective regional policy requires dual targeting: addressing the stock of inequality and the flow of inequality change are distinct tasks that point to different geographies.