| Turkey: Unemployment eases in July, falling to 12.8 pct |
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16/10/2009 12:42 (36 Day 00:32 minutes ago) | |||||
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The FINANCIAL -- In yet another telling sign that the worst of the global economic crisis has passed, Turkish unemployment figures for the month of July stand at 12.8 percent, a slight improvement from the previous month's unemployment rate of 13 percent.
Despite the modest improvement, the figure is still 2.9 percentage points higher than last year's July numbers, which represents an increase of more than 842,000 unemployed people in Turkey. Experts warn that despite the improving outlook of the Turkish economy, soaring levels of unemployment will likely lag well behind the average. Some 3.267 million people are now without work in Turkey.
“It's not a significant improvement,” said Professor Seyfettin Gursel, director of the Center for Economic and Social Research (BETAM) at Bahçesehir University. “But it is an improvement nonetheless,” he stated, describing the figure as important because it represented for the first time that there has been an decrease in unemployment once seasonal variables were factored into the equation. When you factor in seasonal variables, the agricultural labor force increased by 24,000 workers and the non-agricultural increased by 10,000. As a result the non-agricultural unemployment rate from June to July decreased from 17.4 percent to 17.2 percent.
According to Gursel, the single greatest detail that the figures reveal is that “the Turkish economy is no longer contracting. This means, we have reached the bottom” for the labor market. Industrial production reached its bottom in April, and the latest figures now show that “the bottom has been reached in the labor market as well.” Improving industrial production figures as well as improving gross domestic product (GDP) growth have been the two primary factors positively effecting unemployment.
The latest Household Labor Survey, released yesterday by the Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat), revealed that unemployment in urban areas stood at 16 percent in July -- a 4 percentage point increase over last year -- and 6.8 percent in rural areas, an increase of 1.3 percentage points.
"Between July 2008 and July 2009, Turkey's total non-institutional population (i.e., excluding students, prisoners and those serving in the military) increased by 817,000 to 70.57 million; in this group, the number of people who are of working age increased by 881,000 to 51.71 million. When assessing the active labor force and the unemployment rate, TurkStat does not count those who are not actively seeking work, thereby approximately halving the number of those counted in the statistics," Today's Zaman says.
During the same period, the number of employed individuals rose by 50,000 when compared to the same period last year, but when the number of new people in the labor force are factored, in, this represents a net increase in the unemployed as the number of new jobs can't absorb the number of new entrants in the labor force. Approximately 22.213 million people are now employed in Turkey.
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