Three essays on the economic dimension of globalization

Globalization is a comprehensive and multidimensional phenomenon that has a significant impact worldwide. This concept, which constitutes a broad field of discussion from various perspectives, particularly stands out in terms of its economic dimension. This thesis focuses on the economic aspect of globalization and, within this framework, presents three independent essays exploring the key determinants. Each essay focuses on different economic effects of globalization. In the first essay, the relationship between globalization and public expenditures and revenues is examined. In this context, using an unbalanced panel data set, the relationship between various types of public spending and globalization is analyzed within the framework of the "efficiency" and "compensation" hypotheses. The study focuses on the post 1989 period, known as the era of hyper-globalization, using data from developing economies for the period 1990–2019. The analysis largely reveals statistically significant positive coefficients, leading to the conclusion that the compensation hypothesis is predominantly valid. The second essay investigates the relationship between globalization and tourism revenues and expenditures. In this section, the long-term relationship between various dimensions of globalization—including overall globalization, economic globalization, trade globalization, financial globalization, social globalization, interpersonal globalization, informational globalization, cultural globalization, and political globalization—and the number of tourists visiting Turkey is analyzed using the ARDL (Autoregressive Distributed Lag) method for the period 1995–2021. Empirical findings reveal statistically significant relationships particularly in terms of overall globalization, economic globalization, and political globalization. The third essay shows that both the direction and intensity of the impact of globalization on unemployment significantly vary depending on the level of unemployment (quantile), the dimension of globalization, and the level of a country's economic development. Generally, when globalization variables (GLOB, EKGLB, TİCGLB) are considered independently, they exhibit statistically significant unemployment-reducing effects, which align with Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. However, interaction terms representing the interplay between these variables and the level of economic development (GLOBGEL, EKGLBGEL, TİCGLBGEL) mostly show significant unemployment-increasing effects across many quantiles. These findings are interpreted within the framework of the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem.