 announced on Thursday.){kind=link}
Turkey’s unemployment rate fell by 1.1 percentage points year-on-year to 12.7 percent in September, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) announced on Thursday.
The country’s unemployment rate was 13.2 percent in August.
There were 4 million unemployed people aged 15 and over in the month under review, a decrease of 550,000 compared to September 2019, TurkStat said in a statement.
The employment rate dropped 2 percentage points year-on-year in September to 44.1 percent, which translates into 27.7 million people.
The number of people in the labor force aged 15 and over decreased by 1.3 million year-on-year to 31.7 million in September. The labor force participation rate fell by an annual 3 percentage points to 50.5 percent.
The distribution of employment by sector was 55.3 percent for the services sector, 19.9 percent for industry, 18.5 percent for agriculture and 6.3 percent for the construction sector, according to TurkStat data.
TurkStat does not include people who are not seeking a job in the labor force; thus, millions who are not employed are not considered unemployed.
In the meantime the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DİSK-AR) released a statement on Thursday denying the accuracy of the unemployment data announced by TurkStat.
“The unemployment rate isn’t falling; it’s going up. The unemployment rate for September is 26.4 percent, not 12.7 percent,” DİSK-AR said, adding that the coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc on employment figures.