Turkey’s unemployment rate fell 0.3 percentage points month-on-month to 8.7 percent in February, Reuters reported, citing official data on Monday, edging toward the lowest in a decade near levels touched in October last year.
According to “Labor Force Statistics, February 2024” issued by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat), the number of unemployed persons aged 15 and over decreased by 109,000 to 3.7 million in February 2024 compared to the previous month. The unemployment rate was 7.3 percent among men and 11.3 percent among women in February.
In February, the labor force participation rate remained unchanged in at 54.0 percent, while a seasonally adjusted measure of labor underutilization fell 1.9 percentage points to 24.5 percent.
Unemployment was 8.5 percent in October of 2023, the lowest in a decade.
The lowest unemployment rate in the past decade was in 2013, when it stood at 8.9 percent, while the highest rate was in 2019 at 13.7 percent.
Although TurkStat data paint a positive picture of the unemployment rate in the country, the institution’s statistics are met with skepticism. It faces accusations of masking the real unemployment and inflation rates in order to hide the economic deterioration in the country.