Turkey’s Jobless Rate Rises

Turkey’s unemployment rate was announced at 12.6% in the February period, with a 1.7% year-on-year increase, official data showed on Monday, Anadolu Agency reported. This rate showed a slight decrease from a seven-year high at 13% in the previous month, data from the Turkish Statistics Institute showed. The number of unemployed people over 15 years old increased by 676,000 to 3.9 million people in the period of February 2017 compared with the same period of the previous year. In the same period, the non-agricultural unemployment rate was 14.8% with a 2.1 percentage point increase. Youth employment hit 23.3% in the February period, which covered data from January, February and March, with a 4.7% increase compared to the same period of 2016. The number of employed people rose by 500,000 to around 27 million in the period of February 2017 compared with the same period of the previous year. The employment rate was unchanged at 45.3%, according to TUIK data.