Trends in Long-Term Unemployment and Determinants of Incidence of Long-Term Unemployment in Turkey

The long term unemployment, defined as people out of work continuously for a year or over (or for more than six months with another definition) has been one of the most disturbing factors for the labor market performance, the economy, in general as well as for the individual and social well-being. This paper examines the factors that has effect on the incidence of long-term unemployment in Turkey using individual level data taken from Household Labor Force Surveys of 2000 and 2001 and probit model with two-step estimation procedure that considers the sample selection problem. The results show that differences in individual and labor market charactersitics such as gender, age, education, residency, region, status in the household and profession have importance in determining the incidence of long-term unemployment. In fact, being female, older and unemployed, having a degree lower than university and living in rural area increases the probability of being long-term unemployed, while being head of household reduces it