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The unemployment rate in Turkey dropped to 8.4 percent in May, a 0.1 percentage point decrease, official figures from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) show.
TurkStat released its “Labor Force Statistics, May 2024” on Wednesday.
Official data show the unemployment rate on a downward trend, registering 8.5 percent in April and 9.5 percent in May 2023.
The number of unemployed persons aged 15 and over decreased by 27,000 to 3.011 million in May compared to the previous month. The unemployment rate was 7 percent among men and 11 percent among women.
The number of employed persons increased by 273,000 to 32.920 million in May compared to the previous month. Employment stood at 50 percent, demonstrating a 0.4 percentage point increase. It was 67.3 percent among men and 33 percent among women.
The TurkStat data also showed the labor force participation rate rose to 54.5 percent in May with a 0.3 percentage point increase. There were 35.931 million people in Turkey’s labor force in May with an increase of 245,000 people compared to April.
The lowest annual unemployment rate in the past decade was in 2013, when it stood at 8.9 percent, while the highest was in 2019 13.7 percent. It was recorded at 9.4 percent in 2023.
Although TurkStat data paint a positive picture of the unemployment rate, the institution’s statistics are met with skepticism. It faces frequent accusations of masking the real unemployment and inflation rates in order to hide the economic deterioration in the country.