Ankara ranks best in competitiveness

Hurriyet Daily News with wires

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Ankara has creatively outperformed all other Turkish cities to become the country's most competitive city. The virtue that helped the city climb to the top of the "Competitiveness Index Research for Turkey" list was "creativity."

Turkey’s "it" city Istanbul, which is considered to be Turkey’s cultural capital and financial center, ranked second with its competitive power, reported Turkish magazine Ekonomist, citing a study conducted by The Center for Economic and Foreign Policy Studies, or EDAM. The Aegean city of İzmir came in third on the list. The cities with the lowest competitiveness were the eastern cities of Hakkari, Muş and Ağrı.

"Efforts to create this list began about a year ago," Sinan Ülgen, EDAM chairman, said during a press meeting held at the Swissotel in Istanbul Monday. The competitive powers of 81 cities were evaluated and ranked based on six different categories, he said.

Evaluation process

The study was conducted in collaboration with Deloitte, one of the largest professional services firms in the world, and EDAM, a think tank whose objective is to conduct studies and realize policyĞoriented projects that support and contribute to the process of Turkey’s accession to the European Union. Within the framework of the study competitive dynamics were researched in the light of some six sub-indices and 50 variables. The sub indices competitive index was based on were listed as economic effectiveness and activity, labor market, creative capital, human capital, physical infrastructure and social capital.

Ankara ranked higher on the list because it has attained more success in creativity statistics, according to the research. The creativity of a city is based on certain variables, such as technical personnel number per person, research and development investments, academic publication number per person and the number of applications for patents.

The research showed that the public policies implemented by the local administrations and local entrepreneurs would play just as much of an important role as the government policies would play in improving competitive power of the cities, reported Anatolia news agency, citing Ülgen.
The research was aimed to increase competitive powers of all regions and contribute to the creation of new brands, highlight various investment opportunities and point out the policies that need to be changed, according to Deloitte Board Member M.Sait Gözüm.

All cities have their own focus when it comes to competitiveness. Istanbul raked at the top of the list for economic effectiveness and activity, labor market and physical infrastructure. On the other hand, Ankara ranked at the top of human capital, creative capital and social capital indices.

In the overall competitiveness index, Ankara ranked at top with 100 points, while Istanbul grabbed second spot with 97 points. İzmir ranked third with 87.3 points. Other cities that ranked the competitive top 10 were Kocaeli, Eskişehir, Bursa, Yalova, Muğla, Tekirdağ and Antalya, in that order. When transferred to a map, it becomes obvious that the competitiveness in the country declines toward the east. The bottom three on the list were Hakkari with 21 points, Ağrı with 14.8 points and Muş with 14.7 points.