Abstract:

Youth has an important role in the development of countries and Turkey has a large share of young people in its overall population. In that regard, Turkey should be in a position to take important steps on the way to development. However, Turkey cannot provide employment opportunities to its young population as understood by the increasing unemployment figures during the recent years. As educated young people have a higher share among the unemployed, analyzing youth unemployment is of special importance. To this end, by using a Vector Auto-regressive Model (VAR), we econometrically analyzed the impacts of education and growth on unemployment of the young people during 1988-2010. Through the variables analyzed, our findings guided us to causality from youth unemployment to secondary school enrolment, from secondary school enrolment rate to growth rate, from youth unemployment and secondary school enrolment to higher education enrolment. In the long run, apart from itself, the most important variable influencing youth unemployment was the growth rate and the higher education enrolment rate. If these variables were to be used as policy tools to combat youth unemployment, we identified that there would be a trend towards decreasing youth unemployment.

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