Özet:

One of the most pressing issues awaiting solutions in many countries is unemployment. In today's world, social policies developed to address unemployment have largely been shaped by a neo-liberal approach, and one of the most commonly used tools by governments in combating unemployment is "active labor market policies." The investigation of the success of active employment policies, which have been implemented intensively in Turkey, especially since the 2000s, by allocating a significant amount of funds, is important in terms of being able to implement an effective employment policy and to increase the employment rate in Turkey. While there are some studies discussing the effectiveness of active labor market policies in Turkey, there are relatively few empirical studies on the subject. In this context, this study investigates the effectiveness of active labor force policies and public expenditures aimed at reducing unemployment in Turkey for 81 provinces using annual data for the years 2005-2021, through Panel Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (PDOLS) and Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) methods. Our findings indicate that active labor force policies are not an effective policy nationwide in reducing unemployment, but they have reduced the number of unemployed people in some provinces. Our study reveals that further studies need to be conducted at provincial and regional (NUTS) level on why unemployment policies yield successful results in some provinces while increasing unemployment in other provinces.