Yenilikçi faaliyetlerin Türkiye imalat sanayiinin üretim ve ihracat performansına etkisinin ampirik analizi

The Turkish manufacturing industry has undergone a structural transformation that greatly affected its industrial production diversity, capacity, and competitiveness since the 1980s. At the same time, the manufacturing sector has become a critical component of the Turkish economy, which strives to pursue a more robust, powerful, and dynamic integration path with the world economy. However, the innovative and technological knowledge competence of the manufacturing industry did not reach a desired level, and even it was insufficient to build the competitiveness of the country over the years. The data, however, shows that the manufacturing industry and the Turkish innovation ecosystem have witnessed a significant increase in innovative activities since the beginning of the 2000s. The main purpose of this thesis is to empirically investigate the impact of innovative activities on the production and export performance of the sub-sectors of the Turkish manufacturing industry. The way and the extent that innovative activities carried out show widespread heterogeneities across the sub-sectors of the manufacturing industry, and they are often closely related to the special characteristics of these sub-sectors. For each sub-sector, it can be argued that firms converge and cluster by demonstrating similar characteristics in resource utilization, qualification of workforce, production technology, even in innovative pursuits. However, the sub-sectors of the manufacturing industry differ significantly in terms of these characteristics, leading to observed inter-sectoral heterogeneities. Therefore, analysis that can not accommodate the information on sectoral heterogeneities leads to biased estimates. To handle sectoral heterogeneity adequately, this study employs sectoral analysis of the data related to the dependent and explanatory variables of the production and export models. This research uses disaggregated annual data for each of the twenty-two sub-sectors of the Turkish manufacturing industry over the period 2009-2020. The production and export demand equations were estimated using the panel data fixed-effects method. The production model is considered as a function of capital, labor, and innovative activities, while the export demand model includes foreign income and relative prices and R&D expenditure representing the innovative activities of the sub-sectors. Alternatively, the number of R&D personnel was adopted as a specific innovation indicator to measure and report the impact of human capital involved in the research activities in the manufacturing industries. The panel data analysis indicates that R&D expenditure has a positive impact on the sectoral production and export of the Turkish manufacturing industry. However, the empirical evidence presented by this research clearly shows that the impact of R&D on both production and export is quite limited and weak. R&D expenditure is more successful in explaining exports than production as it gets a higher coefficient in the export model. Interestingly, the number of R&D personnel seems to have no statistically significant impact in the cases of both sectoral production and export. Additionally, the regression results inform us about the impact of the remaining explanatory variables. Capital and labor, which are the traditional factors of production, are also found to contribute positively to sectoral production. The findings also show that an increase in foreign income and a decrease in relative prices positively affect sectoral exports. Keywords: Turkish Economy, Manufacturing Industry, Innovation, Research and Development, R&D Expenditure, R&D Human Capital, Growth, Production, Export, Sectors, Fixed Effects Model