Comparison of Relationship Among the Agricultural Production Value, Participation of Women’s Labour Force and Capital Stock by Panel Data Analysis in Regional Level of Turkey

Women play an important role in rural areas with their contribution to agricultural production and the providing sustainability of agricultural production. In rural of Turkey, the women have important contribution in terms of labor in agricultural production factors. In terms of entrepreneurship, women have started to take part in the business life with the supports which are enabling positive discrimination in recent years. The supports of Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry admitting of women empowerment in agriculture, promoting women's entrepreneurship with the Agriculture and Rural Development Support Institution (TKDK-IPARD) projects, the support for setting business of women with Small and Medium Enterprises Development Organization (KOSGEB) and private sector supports are increasing. In this study, it has been argued that the incentives towards women's empowerment contribute positively to the female labor force participation rate and accordingly to the value of agricultural production. In addition, the existence of tractor assets as a stock of capital was added to the model to measure the size of the relationship between agricultural production values of the capital and female labor force according to Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics 1 (IBBS1-NUTS1). 14-year (2004-2017) agricultural production value data in 12 NUTS1 Regions, the women labor force participation in agriculture and the presence of tractor as a stock of capital were examined with Panel Data Analysis (Autoregressive Distributed Lag-ARDL). With the analysis, it was determined that the women labor force participation in agriculture and the presence of the tractor have a positive effect on the agricultural production value. Considering that women are an indispensable element of agricultural production, it can be said that increasing the education and entrepreneurship capacity of women in the agricultural sector, and removing obstacles to access to resources will enable women to be more involved in the registered labor market and have a positive effect on the value of agricultural production