Sustainability of developmant: A comparative analysis of Turkiye and China

In recent years, the concept of sustainable development has started to attract more attention, especially with environmental issues coming to the fore. This concept has become the focus and key point of national economies and international integrations. Countries have included the title of sustainability in their economic development plans, some economic integrations have made sustainable work a condition in the agreement articles. This concept, which has come to the fore, especially in the last 20 years, has become a serious part of the contents of economic policies. In this study, the effect of sustainable development on the economies of China and Türkiye was examined in the axis of descriptive analysis. This review is important in terms of China's important place in the world economy and Türkiye's critical point due to its geographical location and potential that it has. The evaluation of two countries, which are structurally different from each other, in terms of sustainable development also adds a new perspective to this field. In the present study, a broad data set covering food production, renewable energy usage, income inequality, foreign trade, capital movements, labor markets, demographic conditions, the number of hospitals and doctors, migration rates, and patent applications. In this thesis, a comprehensive descriptive analysis and an econometric analysis were performed. In the descriptive analysis, by comparing the two countries via the collected socioeconomic factors, we observed that while both Chinese and Turkish economies show a sustainable development process in terms of some factors, it reveals that current progress in terms of some other factors comes at the expense of future progress processes. In the econometric analysis part of the study, the effects of selected sustainable development indicators on the development processes of countries were estimated via time series analysis. The findings obtained from the ARDL Bounds Test revealed that gross fixed capital formation, energy imports, and patents have positive impacts on GDP per capita in both countries while human capital has a partially positive impact in China. The impact of external debt stock was estimated negative in Türkiye and insignificant in China. Income inequality, on the other hand, has a negative impact in Türkiye and a positive impact in China. Lastly, the share of renewable energy use positively affects GDP per capita in Türkiye while a negative association was estimated for China. The disparities in the two countries reveal that they follow different development strategies. Moreover, China's development agenda seems far from sustainable development principles.