Investigation on the Determinants of Turkish Export-Boom in 2000s

This paper investigates the causes of Turkish export-boom after 2000 in the manufacturing sector. We mainly concentrate on cost and productivity aspects of the production in the manufacturing sector. Effects of productivity, wage and exchange rate are analyzed in the framework of the augmented unit labor cost model. Following the Edwards and Golub (2004) paper we use the dynamic panel data techniques for the analysis. In addition, the importance of the above mentioned factors is examined for the rising and declining sectors. We find that manufacturing export is negatively related to the unit labor cost (ULC). Decomposition of ULC into its two components also shows that an improvement in productivity increases export while an increase in nominal wages decreases it. We also find that nominal wage is an important factor in the declining sectors while productivity is the stimulus in rising sectors.