Alternative income potential of metropolitan municipalities: An investigation on Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality

This thesis study has been prepared to reveal the necessity of reforming the revenue sources of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and to make proposals that will increase the self-revenue capacity. Due to the fact that its being our country's capital city of culture, art, tourism and economy, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, which serves a community well above the registered population tries to meet the increasing and diversified local service demands with limited opportunities. The results of the examinations made on the 2014-2016 budgets of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality have been reached that this municipality does not revenue sources commensurate with its expenditures. The inadequacy of the revenue sources has led to an increase in the budget deficits over the years and an evolution of the debt burden into an unsustainable structural problem. In order to break this vicious circle, efficient revenue sources must be created and allocated to this local government. In this context, instead of increasing the amount of transfers made by the central government, the necessity of making arrangements to increase the self-revenue capacity was specified and new revenue sources for the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality were suggested by examining the revenue generation methods of local governments of developed countries.