The impact of three crises: 1994, 2001 and 2008-09 on the general unemployment in Turkey

The economy of Turkey has gone through a series of economic crises since the 1980s even after the continuous reforms put in place by the government which were market- oriented. The labor market has gone through changes with the advent of each of the crisis. The main aim of this thesis is to check how the economic crisis of 1994, 2001 and 2008-09 affected the labor market of Turkey by looking specifically at the unemployment during these periods. The study used Vector Autoregression X (VARX) model to conduct annual time series analysis from the period of 1990 to 2019 to estimate how these crises (exogenous variables) affected unemployment (endogenous variables) in these periods. The empirical results show a positive and significant impact of the crisis of 2001 and 2008-09 on unemployment while the crisis of 1994 does not have any impact on unemployment. The 2001 crisis affected unemployment most with the male labor experiencing more of the impact than their female counterpart.