Leisure Time Demand and Determinants in Turkey

It was proposed for the first time by Becker (1965) that time allocation should be included in the decision processes of economic agents and accepted as a production input at the time. Together with Granou (1977), economic analysis of the components of household production and of the time individuals spent outside the market became important. Turkey ranks first in terms of men’s paid work and women’s unpaid work hours among OECD countries. With the changing nature of society, man’s position of “breadwinner” has changed in the distribution of work-loads with an increase in women’s participation in the labor force. In this context, Turkey has a special position in terms of gender differences and time allocation and time use. In this study, Turkey’s leisure time demands were analyzed. With this in mind, leisure time demands for men and women - were estimated separately using Time Use data (TUS) 2014-2015 presented by TURKSTAT. When the results are examined, an obvious difference between genders in leisure time demand can be seen. The main reason is that theburden of unpaid household work reduces the flexibility of leisure time for women. However, the most important determinants of leisure time are wages and education level - which is the usual price of leisure time