Davide Luca has been awarded the 2016 G. Leonardi Doctoral Prize (equal first) for his PhD thesis ‘Essays on the political economy of development: Elections, public investment and regional economic growth in post-2002 Turkey’, which was completed in the LSE Department of Geography and Environment in 2015, under the supervision of Prof Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Prof Riccardo Crescenzi.
The prize, bestowed by by the Italian Regional Science Association, will be handed to Dr Luca at the 2016 annual Italian Conference of Regional Science.
Dr Luca’s thesis offers a novel theoretical and empirical perspective cross-cutting Economic Geography, Political Economy, and Middle East Studies. It is one of the first research projects to extensively examine the political economy of development in contemporary Turkey. It explores how the strategic targeting of public investment across provinces to punish/reward voters hampers state effectiveness and affects sub-national development policymaking and performance in contemporary Turkey.