Globalization, technological change and labor demand: a firm-level analysis for Turkey

This paper studies the interlinked relationship between globalization and technological upgrading in affecting employment and wages of skilled and unskilled workers in a middle income developing country. It exploits a unique longitudinal firm-level database that covers all manufacturing firms in Tur...

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Veröffentlicht in:Review of world economics 2016-11, Vol.152 (4), p.655-680
Hauptverfasser: Meschi, Elena, Taymaz, Erol, Vivarelli, Marco
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:This paper studies the interlinked relationship between globalization and technological upgrading in affecting employment and wages of skilled and unskilled workers in a middle income developing country. It exploits a unique longitudinal firm-level database that covers all manufacturing firms in Turkey over the 1992–2001 period. Turkey is taken as an example of a developing economy that, in that period, had been technologically advancing and becoming increasingly integrated with the world market. The empirical analysis is performed at firm level within a dynamic framework using a model that depicts the employment and wage trends for skilled and unskilled workers separately. In particular, the System Generalized Method of Moments (GMM-SYS) procedure is applied to a panel dataset of about 15,000 firms. Our results confirm the theoretical expectation that developing countries face the phenomena of skill-biased technological change and skill-enhancing trade, both leading to increasing the employment and wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers. In particular, a strong evidence of a relative skill bias emerges: both domestic and imported technologies increase the relative demand for skilled workers more than the demand for the unskilled. "Learning by exporting" also appears to have a relative skill- biased impact, while FDI imply an absolute skill bias.
ISSN:1610-2878
1610-2886
DOI:10.1007/s10290-016-0256-y