Turkey constitutes an economic and cultural bridge between the Eastern and the Western world and through its development process it has become an industrial, urbanised country with stronger relations to the global economy. The overall purpose of this thesis is to analyse the Turkish labour market in order to understand the unusual inequality patterns that are observed in it over the post 2000 period.
The first empirical study presented in Chapter 2 investigates the underlying reasons for the decrease in wage inequality in Turkey. The results of the study show that the increasing supply of the educated labour, which is due to increases in the number of universities and the reform to the education system which increased the years of compulsory education, played a substantial role in the decreasing wage inequality in Turkey between 2002 and 2010. Chapter 3 analyses the relationship between domestic violence, traditional social norms, and female autonomy in the household which is one of the factors that plays an important role in the labour force participation decision of women in Turkey. The findings of the analyses suggest that: domestic violence has a negative effect on female autonomy; female autonomy in turn has a significant and negative effect on domestic violence; and finally the strength of the husband’s social norms on traditional gender roles positively affects the risk of violence. The final empirical study of the thesis presented in chapter 4 focuses on the structure of the informal sector employment in Turkey. The results of the empirical analysis suggest a heterogeneous structure for the informal sector in Turkey in which the lower tier consists of workers who involuntarily participate in the informal sector and the higher tier includes the workers who voluntarily choose to be in the informal sector
