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One of the most important aims for local governments is usually based on how they improve their own performance. This steps from growth of the population, scarcity of government resources, increased of the demand for essential government services and budget deficit as well as indebtedness. Local administrations are attempting to reduce the burden on these issues by enhancing their own performance. This paper empirically investigates the convergence hypothesis if the similar local governments within the country converge to the same long-run steady state by considering the five major Turkish Cypriot municipalities in the North Cyprus economy over the period 2004Q1-2019Q4 in terms of economic performance. The concepts of half-life and catching-up hypotheses are conducted to find the economic distance among the municipalities. The results indicate that the municipalities with the lowest number of people per staff, commonly converge to the group mean (Morphou and Iskele). Nicosia and Kyrenia municipalities are less productive than the other municipalities, but Famagusta municipality needs less years than Kyrenia and Nicosia to catch-up the leader one (Morphou municipality). The results also suggest that one of the most important reasons for being less productive is related with over-employment and non-qualified workers, so municipalities need to come up with a new strategy to recruit qualified staff for the most appropriate position. The second one stems from their activities which covered by a grant that the municipalities receive from the central government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study employs a new version of the Solow Growth Model in order to investigate the higher education-led growth (HELG) hypothesis in the case of North Cyprus. Results reveal that a long-run equilibrium relationship exists between real income growth of North Cyprus and its determinants, namely capital, labor, and the higher education sector. Results show that real income growth converges to its long-term equilibrium level by 10.9 %. Granger causality tests suggest undirectional causality from higher education growth to real income growth in North Cyprus. Therefore, the HELG hypothesis can be inferred for the Turkish Cypriot economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the link between financial development and economic growth in a small island economy, North Cyprus. Bounds testing approaches as well as causality techniques are conducted for analyzing an extended version of the augmented Solow growth model over the period 1977–2010. The empirical results suggest that investments in the financial and banking sectors are important drivers for real income growth in both the long and short terms of the North Cyprus economy. The findings also show that private credits in the financial sector do not cause output growth in either the long- or the short-term periods. The impact of physical capital for real income is not also found to be as strong as that of human capital in the case of the North Cyprus economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]