Özet:

Creativity is a factor that encourages entrepreneurship, increases the innovation development capacity and causes development in productivity. As a result, creativity is a factor that works as if an accelerator for economic growth. To determine the creativity levels of regions is very important while making regional development policies because the importance of creativity in regional development increases recently. In this paper, regional creativity index, which bases on creative industry concept, is calculated. According to this regional development index, the most creative region is Istanbul. Other regions are Aegean, East Marmara and West Anatolia, respectively. There is a big difference between the creativity levels of Istanbul and its followers.  Also there is a big gap between the west and east of the country. When we look at the creativity index, we can see that there are sharp decreases in creativity level after economic crises. In another words, we can say that financial crises have negative effects on regional creativity. In creative economy literature, there is a consideration that says there is no relationship between regional creativity and professional sports activities like football and basketball. When this opinion is checked by an empirical analysis, it is seen that there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between professional sports activities and regional development in Turkey

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