One step ahead: the experience at Sabancı University in enhanching student responsibility towards society:

This paper is about a discussion on educating citizenship and social responsibilities at universities through a real life example from Turkey. The recent literature on corporate social responsibility is searching for new ways of education. This paper summarizes one of these new innovative programs, Civic Involvement Projects (CIPs) developed at Sabanci University. The paper starts with a summary of educational issues in the corporate social responsibility literature, including examples of methods and tools used at universities across the world. This overview might help us to see the uniqueness of the CIP experience. The paper concludes with suggestions to universities that are developing or planning to develop their own social responsibility programs. The main question will be to find the ways in reaching major goal of education for social responsibility to assist in understanding, values, and action skills that will help students to work with others to improve the quality and sustainability of their natural and social environments. There is more than one solution in achieving this goal; hence this paper will show just one of these potential solutions based on a real life experience. The methodology of the paper will be a literature review and a case study

The political economy of government programs on export success: a logit model for a Turkish survey

This article examines the differences between exporter and nonexporter small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Turkey to understand the impact of government programs on their export decisions. The empirical data are from a survey of 300 Turkish SMEs (150 exporters and 150 nonexporters) in Turkey. As our question is why some SMEs are exporting while others of a similar size are not, although the government export promotion programs are same for all SMEs, the dependent variable should be dichotomous, and the applicable analytical model should come from the binary-choice genre of models, namely. Results suggest that government export-promoting programs, size of the firms, and manufacturing status of the firms contribute positively to export performance in SMEs, but barriers such as educational level of managers, lack of financial resources, lack of language knowledge, too many government regulations, and high taxes negatively affect the export performance of Turkish SME

Rent-Seeking in Developed and Developing Countries: Cross Section and Time Series Studies

The property rights issue is one of the most important institutional differences between developed/developing countries. The violation of the property rights results with rentseeking. In order to see if the extent of rent-seeking differs significantly between developed and developing countries, I applied a cross section and a time series study with the intention to measure rent-seeking. I found that rent-seeking is low in developed countries whilst it is high in developing counterparts. Turkey, as a developing country was my special case to apply time series study to see if rentseeking vary over the years. In my additional work for Turkey, I found that there is a cointegrating relationship between rent- seeking as a percentage of the budget LnRt and government size ( LnGYt ), and GNP per capita income ( LnGNPCt ).Rent-Seeking; Budgetary Allocation; Cross Section Study; Time Series Study

The developments in the central business district of Istanbul in the 1990s

Since the 1980s, the economic and political conjuncture of the world has changed to a great extent leading to profound transformations in cities and metropolitan areas. Economic restructuring, globalization process, and re-organization of central-local government relations are the basic factors behind these transformations In a similar vein, after the mid-1980s and throughout the 1990s, the development of Istanbul metropolitan area have been characterized by a variety of factors ranging from the implementation of the neoliberal policies at the national level to the changes in the metropolitan government at the local level. Although the roots of this transformation can be traced back to the late-1970s, the most important changes have taken place in the last two decades. After 1980, Turkey adopted neoliberal policies in order to increase its economic articulation to the international relations. As a result of these measures, starting from the mid-1980s, foreign direct investment inflows into Turkey have increased to a great extent. Moreover, parallel to the worldwide trend of rising importance of producer services, the share of service sector investments has increased in total amount of foreign direct investment inflows into Turkey. During this period, Istanbul metropolitan area and especially its Central Business District (CBD) was affected to a great extent by the implementation of private sector-led projects realized by both foreign and Turkish firms operating in various activities such as retailing, tourism, real-estate, finance and other producer services. The author argues that the neoliberal policies of the central government after the 1980s, the increase in foreign direct investments in service sector, the investment shift from industry to commercial and residential real-estate development and financial activities have brought about significant transformations in Istanbul metropolitan area. In this work, in the light of the above-mentioned factors, the development of the Istanbul metropolitan area (especially its CBD development), in the late 1980s and throughout the1990s, will be analyzed.