TY  - JOUR
TI  - Economic Development in Turkey and South Korea: A Comparative Analysis
AB  - An interesting question in comparative economic development is why Turkey fell behind South Korea even though she had better development prospects in 1960. The existing literature offers some illuminating narratives of the most plausible reasons, but only a few papers have identified the microeconomic foundations of the relative underperfor- mance of the Turkish economy. This paper constructs and analyzes two-sector catching up models to find contrasts between Turkey and South Korea. The results, which follow from data-based calibrations, indicate the following: with respect to initial conditions and values of structural parameters, both economies have advantages and disadvantages. The most significant contrast, however, is the huge difference in how efficiently the two countries adopt frontier technologies. While the South Korean economy operates with an efficiency level very close to its upper bound of 100%, Turkey is located at the other end of the spectrum with an efficiency level of less than 1%. Counterfactual experiments confirm the dominant role of this efficiency parameter against initial conditions and other structural parameters. An extended analysis indicates that human capital differences can only partially explain the large difference in efficiency levels
AU  - Attar, M. Aykut
DO  - 10.21773/boun.32.1.1
PY  - 2018
JO  - Bogazici Journal: Review of Social, Economic and Administrative Studies
VL  - 32
IS  - 1
SN  - 1300-9583
SP  - 1
EP  - 28
DB  - TRDizin
UR  - http://search/yayin/detay/467869
ER  -