Exporting and employment generation: A study on Turkish manufacturing

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the impact of exports on labor demand in Turkish manufacturing industry. Firm-level production and trade data of Turkish manufacturing industry for 2003-2013 is used in the analysis. GMM (Generalized Methods of Moments) and Random Effects models were used to explore the impact of exports on labor demand. The estimations were carried out for different technology oriented industries, firm sizes, and 2-digit NACE sub-industries to check if the labor demand dynamics change. The results showed that both manufacturing exports and imports have significant and positive impact on the labor demand of the firm. The impact, on the other hand, was found to differ not only in the firms operating in different technology oriented industries but also in different sub-industries of manufacturing and the firms in different sizes. Keywords: Trade and Labor Market Interactions, Labor demand, Manufacturing Industry, Turkey.