grew faster than their respective urban cores during expansions, while the reverse was true during recessions. Further, the differences in growth between peripheries and their respective urban cores during expansions were more pronounced in the developed provinces because their urban cores grew more slowly.

The following characteristics of Türkiye’s economy lend themselves to examining business cycles from a spatial, and more granular, perspective.<sup>9</sup> First, it is a diverse country. Provinces in the West, closer to Western Europe, are more developed economically and have stronger historical and cultural ties to Western Europe. Provinces in the East either have stronger ties to Asia or to the countries around the Black Sea. Second, Türkiye has experienced booms and busts in the first two decades of the twenty-first century that are pronounced, and not too dissimilar to other middle-income countries (Kose et al. (2021)).<sup>10</sup> Third, Türkiye has simultaneously undergone a process of rapid structural transformation, with the attendant urbanization of many provinces across the country. Fourth, precisely because it straddles Western Europe, the Black Sea region and Asia, economic changes _within_ Türkiye are important from a geopolitical perspective.

This paper provides evidence regarding the nature of two pivotal growth spurts. Acemoglu and Ucer (2015) suggest that Türkiye’s growth between 2002 and 2006 was fundamentally different than the growth that followed the 2008/09 global recession. While we do not attempt to evaluate these periods in a normative sense, we provide evidence in support of the view that the nature of the rebounds differed at both the scale of provinces and urban aggregations.

Related, this paper documents a construction boom that was part of the rebound from the 2008/09 crisis. This may be interpreted as constituting a "big push" in complementary infrastructure investments (Rosenstein-Rodan (1943)). However, issues related to the sustainability of such a push remain relevant across a broad group of countries (Kose et al. (2021)). This paper does not address these issues directly, but documents (spatial) patterns in the sectoral changes at meso-level scales. We find significant differences in the patterns of growth when viewing these booms through a spatial lens. These patterns are often ignored when monitoring growth solely at the national level and serve to reveal changes within subnational economies that are relevant to policy design.

The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 describes analysis of Türkiye’s booms and busts using official province-level data. It begins by providing the relevant macroeconomic context. It then documents changes in absolute convergence across sectors and time periods. Finally, it describes results that provide a spatial perspective on sectoral growth rates across the business cycle. Section 3 shows that the changes in nighttime light luminosity are useful signals

> 9 Zürcher (2017) and Pamuk (2018) provide geographic, cultural, historical, political, and economic context.

> 10 We do not examine the external causes that may be common to many booms and busts experienced by middle-income countries. These include, for instance, the related shocks to global savings imbalances and liquidity, which in turn, are related to the monetary policies of the United States and the European Union (e.g., Rajan (2015), Kalemli-Ozcan (2019), Bräuning and Ivashina (2020)).

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