A Multi-Pronged Approach to Labor Market Flexibility: The Turkish Case

Turkish labor market has experienced low employment performance over the last two decades, which has become more striking after the crisis in 2001. Despite the rapid recovery in output growth, unemployment could not record such an improvement and has remained around 10 % since then. This fact has introduced a new phenomenon to Turkey called “jobless growth”. As a solution to the bottlenecks in the labor market, the concept of “flexibility” has been more frequently pronounced by policy makers and academicians at both national and international level. In the light of flexibility-based arguments, this book takes an impulse from the basic assertion of the neoclassical theory that it is the labor market rigidities that are mainly responsible for high unemployment/low employment performance. The aim of the book is to analyze labor market flexibility with a particular focus on the Turkish context. The analysis should help shed some light on understanding the concept of jobless growth, and should be especially useful to professionals in the field of Labor Economics, or anyone who may be interested in unemployment and employment creation issues.