Publications
İpek Ilkkaracan
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Research Project Reports | April 2019
An Assessment of Care Deficits, Costs, and Impact on Employment, Gender Equality, and Fiscal Returns
Expansion of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services for all is a matter of the choices made regarding the allocation of public resources. As such, it is as much an issue of children’s well-being and gender equality as it is an issue of economic policy and fiscal allocation. This study—authored by Institute scholars Ipek Ilkkaracan and Kijong Kim as a joint production of the Macroeconomic Team of the Economic Empowerment Section at UN Women and UN Women’s Country Team in Kyrgyz Republic—contributes to the policy debate on ECEC expansion in Kyrgyz Republic, particularly from a fiscal policy perspective that focuses on potential short-run economic returns.
Following in the footsteps of recent country policy studies, this research report estimates the required increase in public expenditures on ECEC centers according to different policy scenarios specific to Kyrgyz Republic. The report estimates short-run, demand-side economic returns regarding employment creation, the gender employment gap, and the fiscal sustainability of the initial outlay of expenditures through increased tax revenues. The simulation for ECEC service expansion is compared to the counterfactual scenario where fiscal expenditure of identical magnitude is allocated toward physical infrastructure and construction projects, a common target sector for public spending.Download:Associated Program(s):Author(s):Related Topic(s):
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Working Paper No. 882 | January 2017
A Distributional Analysis of the Care Economy in Turkey
This paper examines the aggregate and gender employment impact of expanding the early childhood care and preschool education (ECCPE) sector in Turkey and compares it to the expansion of the construction sector. The authors’ methodology combines input-output analysis with a statistical microsimulation approach. Their findings suggest that the expansion of the ECCPE sector creates more jobs and does so in a more gender-equitable way than an expansion of the construction sector. In particular, it narrows the gender employment and earnings gaps, generates more decent jobs, and achieves greater short-run fiscal sustainability.
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One-Pager No. 50 | October 2015
Expanding Child Care and Preschool Services
This one-pager presents the key findings and policy recommendations of the research project report The Impact of Public Investment in Social Care Services on Employment, Gender Equality, and Poverty: The Turkish Case, which examines the demand-side rationale for a public investment in the social care sector in Turkey—specifically, early childhood care and preschool education (ECCPE)—by comparing its potential for job creation, pro-women allocation of jobs, and poverty reduction with an equivalent investment in the construction sector.
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Research Project Reports | September 2015
The Impact of Public Investment in Social Care Services on Employment, Gender Equality, and Poverty
View More View LessThe Turkish Case
Produced in partnership with the International Labour Organization, United Nations Development Programme, and UN Women, this report examines the demand-side rationale for a public investment in the social care sector—specifically, early childhood care and preschool education (ECCPE)—by comparing its potential for job creation, pro-women allocation of jobs, and poverty reduction with an equivalent investment in the construction sector.
The authors find that a public investment of 20.7 billion TRY yields an estimated 290,000 new jobs in the construction sector and related sectors. However, an equal investment in ECCPE creates 719,000 new jobs in ECCPE and related sectors, or 2.5 times as many jobs. Furthermore, nearly three-quarters of the ECCPE jobs go to women, whereas a mere 6 percent of new jobs go to women following an expansion of the construction sector.
ECCPE expansion is also shown to be superior in terms of the number of decent jobs (i.e., jobs with social security benefits) created: some 85 percent of new ECCPE jobs come with social security benefits, compared to the slightly more than 30 percent of construction jobs that come with equivalent benefits. Both expansions are found to benefit the poor, with an ECCPE expansion targeting prime-working-age poor mothers of small children showing the potential to reduce the relative poverty rate by 1.14 percentage points. In terms of fiscal sustainability, an ECCPE expansion is estimated to recoup 77 percent of public expenditures through increased government revenues, while construction recovers roughly 52 percent.
The report concludes that in addition to supply-side effects, there is a robust demand-side rationale for expanded funding of ECCPE, with clear benefits in terms of decent employment creation, gender equality, poverty alleviation, and fiscal sustainability. These findings have important implications for expanded public investment in the broader social care sector as a strategy that embraces gender budgeting while promoting inclusive and sustainable growth.
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Working Paper No. 774 | September 2013
Turkish economic growth has been characterized by periodic crises since financial liberalization reforms were enacted in the early 1990s. Given the phenomenally low female labor force participation rate in Turkey (one of the lowest in the world) and the limited scope of the country’s unemployment insurance scheme, there appears to be ample room for a female added worker effect as a household strategy against unemployment shocks under economic crises. Using micro data from household labor force surveys for the 2004–10 period, we examine the extent to which an unemployment shock to the primary male earner instigates female members of the household to move from nonparticipant status to labor market participation.
This paper differs from the earlier few studies on the added worker effect in Turkey in a number of aspects. First, rather than simply basing the analysis on a static association between women’s observed participation status and men’s observed unemployment status in the survey period, we explore whether there is a dynamic relationship between transitions of women and men across labor market states. To do this, we make use of a question introduced to the Household Labor Force Survey in 2004 regarding the survey respondent’s labor market status in the previous year. This allows us to explore transitions by female members of households from nonparticipant status in the previous year to participant status in the current year, in response to male members making a transition from employed in the previous period to unemployed in the current period. We explore whether and to what extent the primary male earner’s move from employed to unemployed status determines the probability of married or single female full-time homemakers entering the labor market. We estimate the marginal effect of the unemployment shock on labor market transition probability for the overall sample as well as for different groups of women, and hence demonstrate that the effect varies widely depending on the particular characteristics of the woman—for example, her education level, age, urban/rural residence, and marital and parental status.
We find that at the micro level an unemployment shock to the household increases the probability of a female homemaker entering the labor market by 6–8 percent. The marginal effects vary substantially across different groups of women by age, rural or urban residence, and education. For instance, a household unemployment shock increases by up to 34 percent the probability that a university graduate homemaker in the 20–45 age group will enter the labor market; for a high school graduate the probability drops to 17 percent, while for her counterpart with a secondary education the marginal effect is only 7 percent.
Our estimate of the total (weighted) number of female added workers in the crisis years shows that only around 9 percent of the homemakers in households experiencing an unemployment shock enter the labor market. Hence we conclude that, while some households experiencing unemployment shocks do use the added worker effect as a coping strategy, this corresponds to a relatively small share. We attribute this finding to the deeply embedded structural constraints against female labor market participation in Turkey.
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