Globalization, technological change and labor demand: a firm-level analysis for Turkey

Download
2016-11-01
MESCHİ, Elena
Taymaz, Erol
VİVARELLİ, Marco
This paper studies the interlinked relationship between globalization and technological upgrading in affecting employment and wages of skilled and unskilled workers in a middle income developing country. It exploits a unique longitudinal firm-level database that covers all manufacturing firms in Turkey over the 1992-2001 period. Turkey is taken as an example of a developing economy that, in that period, had been technologically advancing and becoming increasingly integrated with the world market. The empirical analysis is performed at firm level within a dynamic framework using a model that depicts the employment and wage trends for skilled and unskilled workers separately. In particular, the System Generalized Method of Moments (GMM-SYS) procedure is applied to a panel dataset of about 15,000 firms. Our results confirm the theoretical expectation that developing countries face the phenomena of skill-biased technological change and skill-enhancing trade, both leading to increasing the employment and wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers. In particular, a strong evidence of a relative skill bias emerges: both domestic and imported technologies increase the relative demand for skilled workers more than the demand for the unskilled. "Learning by exporting" also appears to have a relative skill- biased impact, while FDI imply an absolute skill bias.
REVIEW OF WORLD ECONOMICS

Suggestions

Wage Inequality and Wage Mobility in Turkey
Tansel, Aysıt; Guven, Aytekin (2019-02-01)
This paper investigates wage inequality and wage mobility in Turkey using the surveys on income and living conditions. Providing the first evidence on wage mobility for Turkey, our paper also differs from the existing literature by investigating wage inequality and wage mobility over various socio-economic groups. We first present an overview of wage inequality over the period 2005-2011. Next, we compute several measures of wage mobility and explore the link between wage inequality and wage mobility. Furthe...
Sociospatial Segregation and Consumption Profıle of Ankara in the Context of Globalization
Akpınar, Figen (Middle East Technical University, Faculty of Architecture, 2009)
The ‘’Global City Hypothesis’’ argues that the economic restructuring of the new global economy produces highly uneven and polarized employment structure in urban society (1). Today, large global cities are marked by unusually high levels of income inequality. The significant increase in foreign investment and the arrival of the multi-national corporations along with the major accounting, advertising, and marketing firms and the fashion, design and entertainment industry caused changes both in spatial and d...
Preparing Civil Engineers for International Collaboration in Construction Management
Soibelman, Lucio; Sacks, Rafael; Akinci, Burcu; Dikmen Toker, İrem; Birgönül, Mustafa Talat; Eybpoosh, Matineh (American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 2011-07-01)
Economic globalization is increasingly affecting both the construction industry and academia. It is changing the traditional roles of civil engineers and construction managers. Cross-cultural collaboration and communication skills, multinational team management skills, the ability to overcome the social challenges of geographically distributed teams, and familiarity with construction materials, standards, and methods of foreign countries are vital for modern construction professionals. However, the traditio...
Race to the Bottom: Low Productivity, Market Power, and Lagging Wages
Taylor, Lance; Ömer Cender, Özlem (2019-01-01)
"Dualism" in the structure of production across sectors of the U.S. economy, employment by sector, productivity levels and growth, real wages, and intersectoral terms of trade increased markedly between 1990 and 2016. The discussion focuses on 16 sectors. Seven were "stagnant"-construction, education and health, other services, entertainment, accommodation and food, business services, and transportation and warehousing. They had low productivity levels, productivity growth rates hovering around zero, and lo...
Globalization, governance, the role of non-state actors: TOBB as a case study
Özkaban, Duru; Yalvaç, Faruk; Department of International Relations (2011)
This thesis examines TOBB within the global and national socioeconomic context in which it operates, focusing on the last decade. Though states are the main governing bodies and important actors, the role of non-state actors (NSAs) is becoming increasingly important as they are able to intervene and influence policy decisions through various activities. They matter in issues regarding globalization and governance. They interact with various other actors, they have a role in governance schemes and they may h...
Citation Formats
E. MESCHİ, E. Taymaz, and M. VİVARELLİ, “Globalization, technological change and labor demand: a firm-level analysis for Turkey,” REVIEW OF WORLD ECONOMICS, pp. 655–680, 2016, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/49238.