Does exporting create employment? Evidence from Turkish manufacturing

The aim of this study is to analyze the impact of exporting on labor demand in Turkish manufacturing industry. By using Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) with the firm-level production and trade data of Turkish manufacturing industry, this paper is exploring the employment impact of international trade. The analysis is based on firm level data obtained from Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT) and covers the period from 2003 to 2013. The estimations were carried out for different technology-oriented industries and 2-digit NACE sub-industries to see how the labor demand dynamics change. The results showed that both manufacturing exports and imports have significant and positive impact on the labor demand of the firm. The impact, on the other hand, was found to differ not only in the firms operating in different technology-oriented industries but also in different sub-industries of Turkish manufacturing.