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On the Spread of Industry and Movie Theatres in Anatolia 06/12/2010 - Viewed 4618 times

'Hunting Season,' a new film by Yavuz Turgul and Şener Şen - director and the leading actor of 'Muhsin Bey,' considered to be the most important film in Turkish cinema - was released this week. The film is being shown in 325 theatres throughout Turkey. Although I was attracted by the critiques of the film in the papers, I have to admit that the list of 325 movie theaters accompanying the advertisement was of much more interest to me. So I created a data set using the list of movie theatres running the movie.  Then I combined the data with the data on the 1000 largest industrial enterprises in Turkey as published by the Istanbul Chamber of Industry. If we assume that the presence of movie theatres is an indicator of life quality and that the presence of large firms is an indicator of economic opportunity, we can derive a series of conclusions about this data set on the distribution of business and life opportunities in Turkey.

Let me begin with the meaning of the number 325. The number tells us that in Turkey there are 325 movie theaters which have the financial and organizational capacity to screen the most popular movie of the week on the date of release together with other theatres. In the past, a popular international movie could be released in Turkey weeks and even months after the release date in Europe. As Turkey has developed, the time difference has converged to zero; we can watch many Hollywood movies simultaneously with Americans, and some European countries even lag behind Turkey. So now it is time to focus on the gap between Istanbul and Anatolia. Therefore it is of great importance to identify how the 325 movie theatres are distributed across Turkey.[1]

Eighty-four of the movie theatres, representing 26 percent of the total, are located in Istanbul. Ankara and Izmir have 21 and 20 theatres, respectively. The number of provinces which have more than 5 movie theatres is only 12. To put it differently, only in 12 provinces does a young women face a low risk of running into her elder brother iat the movies. The provinces are as follows: Bursa (13), Antalya (9), Kocaeli (7), Balıkesir (7), Manisa (7), Ordu (6), Adana (5), Gaziantep (5) and Trabzon (5).

421 of the 1000 largest industrial enterprise in Turkey, corresponding to 42 percent, are located in Istanbul. The number of provinces which have more than 5 firms in the list of largest 1000 is 24,while the number of those which have more than 10 firms in the list is 14.  The group includes, apart from the renowned industrial centers, Gaziantep (32), Kayseri (26), Konya (21), Denizli (20), Kahramanmaraş (16), Balıkesir (15), Manisa (15) and Eskişehir (13), which attract attention with their recent advances in industrialization. The map in Figure 1 shows the location of the new industrial centers.

Similarly Figure 2 shows the number of large firms and movie theatres within the same map. The examination of the indicators highlights some interesting points:

• I had to exclude Istanbul as it is as big as a medium-size European economy in Figure 2. But we can conclude relying on the number of movie theatres and large firms in Istanbul that the life quality offered by the province lags behind compared to the economic opportunities.
• Considering the developed and emerging industrial regions in Turkey, there appears a linear correlation between the number of movie theatres and industrial activity. In this respect, Gaziantep comes to fore as an emerging province ensured the largest convergence with the developed provinces.
• Kayseri, Konya, Kahramanmaraş and Denizli are the provinces which have relatively fewer movie theatres despite denser industrial activity while in Antalya, Ordu and Trabzon a trend in the opposite direction is observed.

It would be wrong evidently to give a conclusion solely on the basis of the above data that the presence of movie theatres improves life quality. Similarly, we cannot say that life quality is advanced and that the number of theatres increases as industry develops. But we can say one thing: in the coming period, focus will be on the transformation of provinces into competitive economies rather than industrialization. And the rising provinces of Turkey will become more innovative depending on the extent to which they can host skilled labor forces. These provinces should be turned into centers of attraction for young people from all around Turkey and also the world. Regions failing to attract qualified brains will face the risk of losing competitiveness. A province can become a center of attraction to the extent that it is livable. Thus, the number of movie theatres in Turkey, which stands at 325 today, will be an important indicator for monitoring the development and transformation of Anatolia in the period ahead.

In brief, opinion leaders in the emerging provinces of Turkey must stress not only industrialization and competitiveness, but also focus on improving the life quality of the young population.

Figure 1: Provinces Hosting more than 5 firms in the ISO 1000 Large Industrial Enterprise List

Figure 2: Number of firms quoted in the ISO 1000 (vertical axis) and number of movie theatres (vertical axis), excluding Istanbul

[1] TURKSTAT does not provide the number of movie theatres by provinces, but publishes data compiled from the Directorate General for Cinema throughout Turkey. According to this, the number of movie theatres in Turkey has tripled over the last decade, increasing from 516 in 1999 to 1514 in 2008. Over the same period, the number of cinema-goers doubled from 15 million in 1999 to 31 million in 2008. The rise in the number of cinema-goers was ensured via the advances in the Turkish film industry. The audience for Turkish films increased from 2 million in 1998 to 16 million in 2008, whereas the audience for foreign films rose from 13 to 15 million over the same period.

Esen Çağlar, TEPAV Economic Policy Analyst http://www.tepav.org.tr/en/ekibimiz/s/1025/Esen+Caglar