7. High Growth Firms: A Policy Option in Turkey

HGFs increasingly draw attention of policy makers with their outstanding performances as novel policy instruments. However, the heterogeneous nature of firm growth and its erratic patterns make them questionable. In addition, there is not any consensus about the definition and measurement method for high growth, which makes it difficult to compare different studies. The main research questions of this study are, whether HGFs in Turkey share common characteristics with HGFs in other countries and how the cohort of HGFs changes by using different definitions. In empirical part, the firm data is drawn from the SME Support Organization of Turkey (KOSGEB), in two consecutive 4 year periods. Our findings show that HGFs in Turkey have some common characteristics with other countries; they are relatively young and small. Whilst, firms with less than twenty employees comprise the majority of HGFs in this study, they are usually excluded out of the definition of HGFs in other studies. Furthermore, contrary to other studies, high growth is not one-time event and a significant amount of HGFs sustain their outstanding performance in the next periods. Consequently, each definition of high growth leads to a different cohort of firms. Whilst, a firm demonstrate high growth in one variable, it might have negative performance in others. Therefore, policies makers need to adopt their own definition in order to discriminate the outstanding performer firms from the modest ones.