Evaluation of outputs of financial supports provided by the Ahiler Development Agency

Since its establishment, the Republic of Turkey has tried to eliminate the developmental disparities between regions with policies from top to bottom. However, there was no great success in the elimination of inter-regional inequalities with these policies. At the end of the 1990s, in line with Turkey's EU accession target, the EU asked candidate countries to apply regional policies where local actors are active rather than top-down practices as a means of structural policy instruments in the accession process. In this regard, new arguments have been set for the establishment of regional policies in Turkey. In this sense, based on the statistical region units classification made by the European Union Statistics Office (Eurostat) in the mid-1970s, a total of 26 Regional Development Agencies were established, namely Izmir and Cukurova Development Agency in 2006, 8 Agencies in 2008 and 16 Agencies in 2009 with Law no. 5449. In this study, we examined the effectiveness of the financial supports provided to SMEs by the Ahiler Development Agency between 2010 and 2015 years for increasing the capacity of the firms. In this context, books, articles and statistical data related to regional development and development agencies were examined and 89 of 121 companies that received support were surveyed. Results obtained from the survey were evaluated through the SPSS program. As a reult of the study, there has been found a significant increase in the turnover, employment, openness to new markets and market share of companies that received financial support from the development agency in the region. However, there has been found no increase in the exports and R & D and innovation of the majority of the firms.