The effect of state's entrepreneurship incentives on Turkey's entrepreneurship ecosystem

While economic crisis in 1970's and 1980's had significant effects on big-scale companies which have inelastic production systems, small companies had immediately adapted themselves to these crises thanks to their flexible production capabilities. The success of small companies led decision makers to pay attention to the entrepreneurship area. The opinion that entrepreneurship, which has been growing in importance in recent years, is the basic trigger for economic growth and the creation of added value is widely accepted among all circles. With this new concept, governments started to implement various entrepreneurship policies in different areas such as finance, education, facilitation of doing business and so on. The main target of these policies is to widen the base of entrepreneurship in the community by increasing the number of business ownerships and innovative entrepreneurs. One of the most important entrepreneurship policies is to facilitate the access of entrepreneurs to finance. This policy could be conducted by either providing capital tools for entrepreneurs to utilize by increasing the sophistication of the market or directly funding the projects of the entrepreneurs technically or financially. In this study, the basic definitions and concepts of entrepreneurship are stated, the approach of the Turkish State on entrepreneurship area is examined and Turkey's entrepreneurship performance is revealed by a spatial analysis based on 26 NUTS 2 region. Moreover, having evaluated the entrepreneurship supports of Turkish State, the effect of this supports and some other variables such as per capita amount of tax burden rate and per capita amount of bank deposit rate on the entrepreneurship ecosystem is evaluated using an econometric model. The entrepreneurship ecosystem in models is digitized by new firm birth rates and the business ownership rates. In conclusion of the research, it is observed that the Turkish State has recently realized the importance of entrepreneurship and accordingly conducted some support programs by developing policies within this scope. According to the evaluations of international institutions operating in the entrepreneurship area like GEM and GEDI, Turkey's entrepreneurship performance has been increasing year by year. In addition, according to the results of the spatial analysis within this study, while some regions in Turkey are becoming the center of attraction for entrepreneurial activities, some regions are having economic vicious cycles. Also, as a result of the econometric model constructed within the study, while TUBITAK TEYDEB incentives and the increase of per capita amount of bank deposit rate effects the entrepreneurship ecosystem positively, the increase of per capita amount of tax burden rate has negative effects on the entrepreneurship performance. Keywords: Entrepreneurship, New enterprises, Entrepreneurship policy, Entrepreneurship ecosystem of Turkey, Efficiency of State aids.