The impact of the Turkish employment subsidy programs on increasing the level of social protection for women

Abstract EN

This paper investigates the impact of the employment subsidy program implemented in 2008 by Turkish government to generate new employment opportunities for women and young men.

More precisely, using a nationally representative individual level data, we analyze the impact of the program on social protection of women by checking the transitions in the labor market states.

Using difference-in-differences (DID) estimation technique; we assess the effectiveness of the policy by analyzing the switches from informal employment to formal employment, from unemployment to formal employment and from out of the labor force to formal employment.

Our results indicate that the reform did not effectively increase the employment probabilities of women compared to men who are not eligible to benefit from the program but formality of women in the labor market increased significantly suggesting an expansion in the social security coverage women in Turkey.