Green Growth in Turkey: A Statistical Comparison with OECD Indicators

The main purpose of economic growth theories has been to increase the welfare of people by using scarce resources. In these theories, it is accepted that human welfare is directly proportional to indicators such as GDP and GNP. With the increase of environmental problems following the Second World War, the increase in these two indicators started to be seen as inadequate to represent human welfare. Human welfare and economic development are based on a more environmentally friendly structure in the green growth model, which is the result of environmental problems. In green growth, where classical economic indicators are insufficient, more comprehensive indicators are needed. In order to address this insufficiency, OECD prepared green growth indicators in Rio+20 conference in order to ensure the healthy implementation of the Green Growth strategy and to ensure a healthy and continuous control of the transition process. These indicators were chosen according to well-defined criteria and were placed in the structured conceptual framework around 4 main headings, which were created to observe the main characteristics of green growth. In this study, the steps that Turkey has taken in the context of the OECD green growth indicators have been investigated comparatively.