turkISh emIgrAtION ANd ItS I mplICAtIONS 117
costs. Most of these can be related in one way or another to the economic
and social consequences that migratory f lows generate in the country.
Accordingly, drawing on evidence from Turkish emigration to Europe in
particular, the following part of the chapter investigates the economic and
social consequences of emigration for Turkey.
3.3.1 Economic consequences
The economic consequences of emigration are examined by two basic
approaches at the macro level: the ‘balanced-growth’ and the ‘asymmetric-
growth’ models (Keleş 1985: 54; Martin 1991: 8). The balanced-growth
approach assumes a positive impact upon the national balance of trade,
an increase in domestic investment and, consequently, an accelerated
economic growth. For instance, Martin (1991) asserts that emigration can
reduce economic differences because the transfer of labour helps the
emigration area to catch up economically with the immigration region.
This optimistic model is based on two assumptions: f irst, that there is
relief of pressure on the job market without any loss of production, since it
is supposedly the case that unemployed workers migrate, and, second, that
there is a contribution to the development of the homeland through the
returned migrants’ industrial training and experience acquired abroad. On
the other hand, the asymmetric-growth model posits that emigration from
developing countries results in a widening gap between underdevelopment
in the sending country and development in the receiving country. Within
this pessimistic model, it is thought that both the displacement of labour
from underdeveloped to industrialised countries and the transfer of human
capital from agriculture to industry cement the asymmetric relationship
between the migrant-receiving core regions and the migrant-sending
peripheries. Brief ly, studies departing from this hypothesis consider emigra-
tion with disfavour, since it allegedly distorts and perhaps slows down the
development in the migrants’ areas of origin (Abadan-Unat, Keleş, Penninx,
van Renselaar, van Velzen & Yenisey 1976; Penninx 1982; Schiller 1975).
Furthermore, besides the macro-level impact of emigration on a migrant-
sending economy, there are also various micro-level effects of emigration
f lows on emigrant households and communities. For instance, evidence
from many emigration studies shows that, despite the poverty reduction
resulting from remittances, the latter may also induce income inequality
to rise. Moreover, a signif icant proportion of the related literature indicates
that remittances are used for mixed reasons, such as consumption, housing,
purchasing of land, f inancial saving and productive investment. However, it