Policy Recommendations for Information and Communication Technology Adoption in Turkey

This study investigates the level of technological advancement of firms in Turkey with an emphasis on adoption of information and communication technologies It discusses political interventions targeting technologically underdeveloped firms. The level of technological advancement is measured by the ownership of specific technologies such as local area network (LAN), wireless local area network (WLAN), intranet, and extranet. It is assumed that these technologies are complementary. Adoption of these four technologies indicates full complementarity. Technological ownership models (one technology, two technologies, three technologies and four technologies) are estimated by ordered logit. The effect of firm size, trade openness, human capital, purposes of ICT usage and environmental factors such as region and industry increase the tendency of adopting the complementary technologies. Adoption of one technology or two technologies, on the contrary, is negatively affected by those factors. In our study, one and two- technology owner firms are mainly small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Considering the large number of SMEs in Turkey, it is necessary to formulate a set of policies in order to solve the problems of late adopters.