Technological change, human capital, and absorptive capacity: Can Turkey escape the Middle Income Trap?

Download

852-5040-1-PB.pdf

Date

2016-4

Author

Yılmaz, Gökhan
Saraçoğlu, Dürdane Şirin

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

245
views

294
downloads

In this study, we build an endogenous growth model around the idea that in order to escape the Middle Income Trap (MIT) and catch-up with the rich economies, a country in the MIT (like Turkey) needs to experience technological change at a rate faster than that of the world frontier technological progress, and to realize convergence, she must increase technological absorptive capacity. We show that by increasing the years of schooling, educational quality, and the share of capital goods imports in GDP, not only the level of technology will improve, but also the rate of technological progress and labor productivity growth will improve, making it possible for Turkey to eventually escape the trap. Moreover, increasing the share of researchers in overall educated population helps to avoid the trap by decreasing the threshold to start the catch-up process, and increasing the domestic technology level relative to the world frontier.

Subject Keywords

Economic growth, productivity, Structural change, Middle income trap

URI

http://www2.feas.metu.edu.tr/metusd/ojs/index.php/metusd/article/view/852
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/58216

Journal

ODTÜ Gelişme Dergisi

Collections

Department of Economics, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Social capital, innovation and growth: Evidence from Europe Akçomak, İbrahim Semih (2009-07-01) This paper investigates the interplay between social capital, innovation and per capita income growth in the European Union. We model and identify innovation as an important mechanism that transforms social capital into higher income levels. In an empirical investigation of 102 European regions in the period 1990-2002, we show that higher innovation performance is conducive to per capita income growth and that social capital affects this growth indirectly by fostering innovation. Our estimates suggest that ...
Knowledge and Economic Growth: A Dynamic Panel Data Analysis for OECD Countries Utku İsmihan, Fatma M. (Science And Technology Policies Research Center, Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey), 2018) This paper aims to investigate the role of knowledge in the economic growth convergence of the OECD member countries during the 1995-2011 period, by utilizing production function approach. In our augmented production function framework, in addition to human capital, we consider other important channels of knowledge (R&D, trade and ICTs) to understand how knowledge contributes to the growth performance and growth convergence of the OECD countries. Furthermore, in contrast to most of the existing studies whic...
Disaggregate energy consumption, employment and income in Turkey Sarı, Ramazan; Soytaş, Uğur (2004-05-01) The purpose of this paper is to contribute to literature on energy consumption and economic growth relationship by examining how much of the variance in national income growth can be explained by the growth of different sources of energy consumption and employment in Turkey. We use the recently developed generalized forecast error variance decomposition technique of Koop et al. [J. Econom. 74 (1996) 119] and Pesaran and Shin [Econ. Lett. 58 (1998) 17] to determine the information content of the growth rate ...
Energy consumption, economic growth, and carbon emissions: Challenges faced by an EU candidate member Soytaş, Uğur; Sarı, Ramazan (2009-04-15) This paper investigates the long run Granger causality relationship between economic growth, carbon dioxide emissions and energy consumption in Turkey, controlling for gross fixed capital formation and labor. The most interesting result is that carbon emissions seem to Granger cause energy consumption, but the reverse is not true. The lack of a long run causal link between income and emissions may be implying that to reduce carbon emissions, Turkey does not have to forgo economic growth.
Technical change and efficiency in Turkish manufacturing industries Taymaz, Erol (1997-11-01) Technical progress and production efficiency are central to economic growth and international competitiveness. However, these topics received little attention in Less Developed Countries. This study is the first attempt to measure and to understand the extent and importance of technical progress and efficiency in Turkish manufacturing industries. Stochastic production frontiers for Turkish textile, cement, and motor vehicles industries are estimated by using panel data of plants for the years 1987 to 1992. ...

Citation Formats

G. Yılmaz and D. Ş. Saraçoğlu, “Technological change, human capital, and absorptive capacity: Can Turkey escape the Middle Income Trap?,” ODTÜ Gelişme Dergisi, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 391–424, 2016, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: http://www2.feas.metu.edu.tr/metusd/ojs/index.php/metusd/article/view/852.