SPATIAL STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF PARTICIPANTS IN THE INDIVIDUAL PENSION SYSTEM OF TURKEY

Abstract

The individual pension system is known as the personal future investment system that allows participants to regularly save for their retirements. Thus, the role of this system among incomes in retirement has significantly grown in the last decade in Turkey as in other countries. In Turkey, the participation in the individual pension system has been voluntary since the beginning of this system. Thus, it is important to study the factors affecting the participants of the individual pension system and also the distribution of the participants in Turkey. In this study, participants’ data in the individual pension system of Turkey (2013), provided by the Pension Monitoring Center, is examined at provincial level by means of GIS and spatial statistics tools. Firstly, spatial distribution, spatial local and global clustering for the participation rate have been researched. Also, the participant rate in Turkey with the effects of variables measured at provincial level (the labor rate, unemployment rate, sex ratio, urbanization rate, deposit rate, illiteracy rate and human development index) is studied by using the spatial econometrics models. The result shows that there are global and local spatial autocorrelations between the participation rates in Turkey and also the spatial lag model provides better results than the classical regression model and some other spatial models in terms of all criteria.