Three essays on the impacts of internal migration in Turkey

Dating back as far as the history of mankind, the concept of migration emerged as a consequence of the people's willingness to relocate due to various reasons. Scope of migration, which influence people's lives with its causes and consequences, has evolved in and became a significant research area. The impacts of both domestic and international migration are intensely felt in Turkey. Nevertheless, as the domestic migration activity is multi-dimensional this study focuses on domestic migration in Turkey. Considering the fact that relocation of population influences the entire country in many respects, what and how this process affects becomes an even more important issue. This study focuses on three titles that has been addressed in a limited number of studies abroad and studied even less in the domestic literature. In this way, it is intended to identify different points that require attention regarding the management of migration and the contribution of the dissertation is based on revealing these points. The mentioned focal points have been identified as the impacts of domestic migration on sectoral wages, living standards and consumer prices. In the study, the impacts have been estimated through panel econometric models. While dependent variables have been identified through the mentioned focal points, independent variables have been addressed according to the education levels of migrants by gender, schooling rates of local population by gender and real gross domestic product per capita. These variables are used in representation of the supply and demand aspect in the labor market. In the study consisting of three empirical parts, living standards- one of the dependent variables – is an index comprised of 15 separate indicators, another dependent variable is the consumer price index. The last dependent variable is the real wage level identified separately for manufacturing, raw material, construction and services sectors. Findings of the empirical analyses suggest that gender, education level and schooling rate of migrants, and per capita gross domestic product do affect dependent variables in the analyses. However, it has been concluded that the impact of education levels of migrants on sectoral wage rates is quite small whereas on living standards and inflation is relatively large. We believe these findings regarding wage rates are highly related with the existing unemployment rate.