UNU-MERIT Working Papers Series
Globalisation, technology and the labour market: A microeconometric analysis for Turkey
Elena Meschi, Erol Taymaz & Marco Vivarelli #2016-026This paper studies the interlinked relationship between globalisation
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.
Keywords: Skill-biased technological change, international technology
transfer, GMM-SYS
JEL Classification: O33
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