The paper has two objectives. The first objective is to summarize the evolution and current status of cluster policies in Turkey. The second objective is to contribute to the understanding of the role of clusters on regional economic performance through investigating the impact of related variety on regional economic growth in Turkey. The clustering projects in Turkey started in the beginning of 2000 where the national clustering projects are jointly funded by the EU and the Republic of Turkey. The empirical results confirm that related variety across industries is a significant driver of economic growth in Turkey indicating that in designing official clustering policies, it is necessary to take sectoral variety into consideration.