THE DETERMINANTS OF THE TURKISH AGRICULTURAL EMPLOYMENT
THE DETERMINANTS OF THE TURKISH AGRICULTURAL EMPLOYMENT

Summary/Abstract: During the post-2008 economic crisis, the Turkish agricultural employment began to increase gently. The structural change in agricultural employment following the economic crisis validated the significance of the sector in terms of designing effective policy making strategy. The papers centered on the subject are usually conducted based on the micro-data. However, in this paper we used macroeconomic variables to search for the possible determinants of the Turkish agricultural employment by the quarterly data from 1988: Q1 to 2011: Q4. We initially estimated the parameters by the method of ordinary least squares linear regression with four specifications to observe the effects of the 2008 crisis on agricultural employment and its changing dynamics. We found that the elasticity of agricultural employment to the agricultural output and the agricultural prices is significantly positive for the post-2008 period in most of the specifications. However for the pre-2008 period we observed that the effect of agricultural output on agricultural employment was negative when seasonal dummies had been included. Besides, the agricultural price elasticity of agricultural employment may be negative for the pre-2008 period in some specifications. Considering the spurious regression concern that is supported by the integrated degrees of the variables, for the long-run relationship, we estimated Johansen and Engle-Granger cointegration tests. Cointegrating equations indicated a stationary linear relationship among the variables. The impulse responses indicated that the initial response of the agricultural employment to the agricultural output is negative for the full sample and pre-2008 sample, but positive when the post-2008 period is considered. The response of the agricultural employment to the agricultural prices is positive for all of the sample periods that we are concerned with.

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