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Turkey’s unemployment hits 13.7% in 2019

March 11, 2020 at 1:20 am

Imam Osman Gokrem (C) offers bagels to homeless people at the Selime Hatun Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey on 29 June 2019 [Arif Hüdaverdi Yaman/Anadolu Agency]

Turkey’s unemployment has risen to 13.7 percent in the period from November 2019 to January 2020, compared to 13.3 percent a month earlier, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) announced yesterday.

TurkStat said that the number of unemployed Turkish youth aged 15 years old and overreached 4.4 million, up from 94,000jobless people in November 2018.

“The rate of neither in employment nor in education realized as 25.4 percent, with a 0.5 percent increase compared to the same period last year,” TurkStat said.

READ: Youth constitute 15.8% of population in Turkey

Turkey’s economy rebounded strongly in the fourth quarter of last year following a remarkable recession incurred by a currency crisis in 2018. The crisis has led to a jump in the unemployment rate, reaching 14.7 percent – the highest in 10 years.

In December, the country’s employment rate rose to 44.7 percent, compared to 44 percent in December 2018.

Turkey’s labour force participation rate was reported recently to have slipped by 0.6 percent year-on-year, down to 51.8 percent in December.

The Turkish government’s recently-announced economic programme estimates the unemployment rate to reach 9.8 percent in 2022.