An Assessment of Manpower and Educational Planning in Turkey: Shifting from Long‐Range Forecasting to Employment Policy

Abstract

After the restoration of Turkish parliamentary democracy in 1961, Turkey adopted the path of development by planning to be coordinated by the newly created State Planning Organisation (SPO). Manpower and educational planning were given top priority and longrange forecasting became an important task of SPO's Social Planning Department (SPD). Some 20 years later, the same institutional organisation and the original preoccupation with longrange manpower forecasting is maintained, despite the fact that this period has seen a rapid technological, structural and industrial transformation of the economy and the emergence of an acute problem of unemployment. While manpower planning is focused on future labour market conditions, there is virtually no employment policy designed to accelerate productive employment creation in the short and medium runs.