Relative labour deprivation and urban migration in Turkey

The paper develops a concept, a measure and an index of relative labour deprivation and applies these tools to measure deprivation in urban areas of South-East Turkey. It is shown how a Yitzhaki-type of relative deprivation index can be applied to the labor domain and be extended to take into account the notion of reference group derived from modern theories of social justice. In the absence of panel or longitudinal data, such measure results particularly useful to derive policy recommendations for areas characterized by heterogeneous communities. Contrary to what conventional statistics and wisdom would suggest, we find migrants from Eastern Turkey to be less relatively labour deprived than other groups of migrants.