Essays on the impacts of public expenditures in Türkiye

The state can touch the lives of citizens with different socio-economic characteristics through public expenditures. Evaluating public expenditures by their effects on growth alone will lead to neglecting many significant effects. Each part of this thesis, which consists of three main chapters, analyzes the impact of different public expenditures at the provincial level in Türkiye. The first chapter examines the concept of national product from a critical point of view. It emphasizes that the primary goal of public expenditures should be to increase the life satisfaction of individuals rather than increase the national product. From this point of view, it examines the relationship between public expenditures and life satisfaction by using the 2013 Life Satisfaction Survey data. This chapter concludes that health services are more efficient in life satisfaction than education and recreation, culture, and religion services. The second chapter examines the relationship between the payment of health insurance premiums by the state (green card) of low-income individuals, which is included in public social expenditures, and five different types of crime. It finds a negative relationship between the number of green card holders and crime rates except robbery. This result confirms the thesis that from a Beckerian point of view, paying insurance premiums by the state can reduce crime rates by increasing the opportunity cost of criminal activity. The last part investigates the efficiency of health expenditures by using the Data Envelopment Analysis method. It analyzes output variables by dividing them into two groups: infant and child mortality rates and mortality rates for the leading causes of death. The results of Tobit analysis conclude that early marriage triggered by low education level is an important factor for infant and child deaths. In addition, it finds that the state's payment of the General Health Insurance premium of the low-income leads to a decrease in the mortality rates for the leading causes of death. As a result, this thesis emphasizes that public expenditures, which is an essential fiscal policy tool, can affect people and society in many different ways, that these effects should be taken into account during the planning of public policies, and that the analysis of the effect of public expenditures cannot be compressed between public expenditures and growth.