New Technology, Work and Employment 14:2 ISSN 0268-1072 New technologies and employment: industry and firm level evidence from Turkey Hacer K. Ansal and Dilek Cetindamar Karaomerlioglu Here the authors investigate the impact of new technology on employment at country, industry and firm level using evidence from a study of the Turkish chemical and engineering indus- tries. They conclude by attempting to outline policy consider- ations related to the long term negative impact of technology on employment in developing countries. The 1980s and 1990s have been marked in most OECD countries by the steady spread of new technologies (NT) and, slower economic growth together with persistent and rising unemployment rates, which reached their highest levels since the 1930s (OECD, 1993). The severity of the unemployment problem and the labour-saving nature of technological changes that generate improvements in labour productivity, led many economists to study the causal links between technical change, growth, and employment in developed economies. Although the most mainstream economists reject technical progress as a possible cause of unemployment, international agencies, in the early 1980s, started to express their concern at the likely unemployment deepening effect of NT on Third World countries which had been largely passive recipients of these technologies. On the other hand, some initial studies (Jacobsson, 1985; Fransman, 1984) have illustrated how adoption of NT by East Asian producers of machine tools helped them to expand their market shares in the world markets and hence their employment level in these industries. The study of direct impact of adopting new technology (NT) on employment in the Third World, overall, has so far received very little attention from researchers. Although the diffusion has not yet been very extensive, the problem of technological unemployment particularly is of concern for developing countries like ❒ Hacer K Ansal is Professor of Economics at Instanbul Technical University. Dilek Cetindamar Karaomerlioglu is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Economics at Case Western Reserve Uni- versity, Cleveland, USA.  Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA. 82 New Technology, Work and Employment