Turkey’s labor market needs reforms to become more flexible and bring the unemployment rate below 10%, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek said Monday, Anadolu Agency reported. Speaking after the Turkish Statistics Institute released the unemployment rate for the October-December 2015 period, Simsek said he did not see a “bad trend” in unemployment. “It is unlikely for Turkey to decrease the unemployment rate below 10% unless reforms are made. We need to make the job market more flexible to bring the unemployment rate below 10%,” he said. Turkey’s unemployment rate stood at 10.5% in the October-December 2015 period, unchanged from a month earlier and down from 10.7% in the same period a year earlier, TUIK said. The non-agriculture unemployment rate, also measured on a three-month average, stood at 12.4% during the same period, down from 12.6% in the September-November 2015 period and 12.7% in the same period a year ago.
