Minimum wages, social security and household welfare in Turkey

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2749093_(Table of contents)

In this study, we investigate the effects of minimum wage change together with a social security reform on households’ welfare and social security budget in Turkey. For this research, we focus on 2014 and 2016 since both changes occurred in these years, and we can observe the effects and consequences jointly and severally. We used large-scale longitudinal data and developed an overlapping generations model (OLG) for our analysis. The main results of this study are: despite its restricted domain, social security reforms increased collected taxes, but it has extenuating effects on households’ welfare. On the other hand, the minimum wage changes have a larger impact area, and it has altered both the social security budget and households’ welfare positively.