Unemployment Persistence and Inflation Convergence: Evidence from Regions of Turkey

As an emerging economy, Turkey has suffered from high unemployment rate, as well as major discrepancies among regional unemployment rates, even in the periods of rapid economic growth. In this study, we mainly investigate the unemployment persistence at the regional level for Turkey, and we apply recent and powerful Panel-based Unit Root (PUR) tests, when the panels have small time series dimensions and cross-sections in highly persistent data. Results from the PUR tests clearly show that the existence of the unemployment persistence in most of the regional unemployment rates of Turkey. By using same PUR tests, we also test the possible divergence in regional inflation rates in same data for evaluating further monetary policy implications. Our findings show that national monetary policy can efficiently impacts on most of Turkish regions.