Turkey's high-tech profile and sustainable development

Abstract

Over the last two decades, technology plays a key role in explaining overall economic performance of countries. Particularly, high-tech sectors are accepted as one of the most dynamic components of the performance of new emerging countries. In this context, the relationship between technological change/improvement and growth was examined by a number of empirical studies for many developed and developing countries. These studies have revealed strong correlation between them. However, none of them considered this relationship from the perspective of sustainable development, which may be defined as a good compromise area among economics, society and environment. Since the manufacturing faces the challenge of satisfying societal needs regarding environmental issues, the environmental side effect of technology and solutions with the help of technological improvement, which seems to be a contrary with each other, are crucial to make such an assessment. This study deals with the above relationship by assessing the effects of high-tech industries on Turkey's manufacturing from the perspective of sustainable development. The study is structured as follows: after the introduction, Section 2 offers a brief overview of the empirical literature on technology and growth and its shortcomings from the perspective of sustainable development. In this section, the role of high-tech industries in sustainable development is also given. Then Section 3 gives a brief overview on Environmentally Sound Technologies (ESTs) related with Turkey's high-tech sectors. Section 4 presents the high-tech profile of Turkey's manufacturing industry particularly from the perspective of environmental conditions. Section 5 gives a summary.