Turkey’s rurality: A comparative analysis at the EU level

The future of Europe’s rural peripheries as well as the future of rural societies is an important development and planning issue in the EU. Several typologies of rural areas and different rural indicators have been developed by researchers and international organizations such as OECD and EU to better understand the dynamics of rural areas and to develop relevant policies for these areas. Rural indicators include a wide range of indicators from population and migration to economic structure and performance and from social well-being and equity to environment and sustainability, whereas the common approach of the rurality measurement is mainly focused on demographic indicators such as population and population densities. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to compare and evaluate rurality of EU member states, while identifying the place of Turkey’s rurality within EU on the basis of various selected rural indicators. The data and information used for comparison and evaluation of 26 countries (EU-25 and Turkey) are based on Eurostat and World Bank data. A multidimensional classification technique, factor analysis, is deployed to define Turkey’s rurality in the European context by means of 5 factors, viz. underdevelopment, demography, urbanization, higher education and industrialization. The results of our study show that northern and western European