Turkey's official unemployment rate declines to 8.8 pct in July

Duvar English

Turkey's official seasonally adjusted (narrow-defined) unemployment rate declined to 8.8% in July, from an 11-month high of 9.2% in June, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) reported on Sept. 10.

The number of unemployed fell 112,000 month-on-month to 3.17 million as of July, TÜİK data demonstrated.

The unemployment rate for men decreased by 0.5 percentage points from a month earlier to 7% and was stable at 12.4% for women.

The labor force participation rate increased to 54.4% in July, reflecting a slight rise of 0.1 percentage points from June. The employment rate also saw an uptick, climbing by 0.3 percentage points to 49.6%, which corresponds to 32.7 million people employed.

Youth unemployment, defined as those aged 15-24, decreased marginally by 0.1 percentage points to 16.6%. Among youth, the unemployment rate was 12.2% for men and 25% for women.

Number of broadly defined unemployed reaches 10.7 million, labor union says

Research Center (DİSK-AR) of the Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions of Turkey (DİSK) calculated the broad-defined unemployment rate as 26.5 percent and the number of unemployed as 10.7 million in July based on TÜİK's data.

The narrow definition of unemployment considers unemployed individuals who actively searched for work in a specific time frame while broader definition expands this by including those who desired employment but did not actively seek it during the reference period.

Broad-defined unemployment was calculated as 21.1 percent for men and 35.7 percent for women with a striking 14.6 points difference.

The union noted that Turkey has the fourth highest unemployment rate among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and that the broadly defined unemployment rate was two times higher than the E.U. average and 3.4 times higher than the U.S. average.