Anatolian Tigers and the Emergence of the Devout Bourgeoisie in the Turkish Manufacturing Industry: An Empirical Analysis

It has widely been asserted that an important dimension of social dynamics that eventually carried the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) to political power is the emergence of a “devout bourgeoisie” especially in the new growth centers of Anatolia. In this paper, we use firm level data over the last three decades to trace the economic and especially productivity dynamics in the manufacturing industries of new growth centers in Anatolia (“Anatolian Tigers”) in comparison to the traditional growth centers (the “West”). We observe that what happened in the 1990s in the Tigers was a significant change in the size distribution of employment with the emergence of a significant number of medium sized enterprises. In the 2000s there was a visible convergence between the labor productivity of highly productive firms in the Tigers and the West, whereas divergence occurred at the lower end of the productivity distribution. We then examine the evolution of members of religious business associations among the largest 1000 manufacturing firms in Turkey. We observe that the number of such firms increased substantially especially after mid-1990s. These firms are concentrated in relatively more labor-intensive industries, and have lower productivity than firms associated with business associations that represent the traditional industrial elite and are quite export oriented. We discuss the possible role of political connections and conclude they possibly had a more diminished role in the emergence of devout businesses in manufacturing compared to rent-thick activities such as public procurement, construction or regulated industries.