A new perspective on women’s care burden and employment in Turkey

Women’s intra-household care burden is one of the main reasons behind women’s low employment rates in Turkey. Many empirical studies have tested this relationship by focusing on the existence of dependent household members, if any. They have largely overlooked the use of care services and the time spent on caring for dependent household members to evaluate women’s care burden. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between women’s care burden and employment prospects and status in Turkey from the perspective of access to care services and the time dimension of the care burden. This relationship is analyzed through the logit model by using latest available data from the 2014–2015 Time Use Survey. The article shows that the time spent by women caring for dependent household members, and access to care services, are the most important factors influencing women’s employment probability in Turkey. Benefiting from informal childcare services increases the employment probability of women approximately twenty-seven times, while benefiting from formal childcare services increases two times and informal adult-care services 2.6 times. Ensuring the accessibility of institutional care services improves women’s employment status by enabling women’s transition from part-time to full-time jobs, and from unskilled to professional jobs.

Basic income and its applicability in Turkey

In search of justice in income distribution and easy access to necessities by everyone, basic income (BI) has become one of the main topics of conversation. However, there is no comprehensive study on the cost and effect of BI in Turkey. This study aims to set a theoretical framework for BI, compare different views on the topic, evaluate implementations from the world, and analyze the feasibility of a BI program in Turkey by estimating its costs and distributional consequences using a tax–benefit microsimulation. The results show that, although it improves the income distribution, implementing a basic income scheme financed by income tax would impose a significant burden on the upper half of the income distribution due to widespread poverty and income inequality. In the baseline, individual-based scenario, every individual aged 15 or above is granted a BI equal to the poverty line, while children below age 15 are granted 30 percent of this amount. This plan costs 17.77 percent of the gross domestic product and it is covered by multiplying current income tax by 3.54. Implementation of this plan decreases the poverty rate from 12.43 percent to zero and the Gini index from 0.388 to 0.181.