Turkey's jobless rate falls to 10.8 percent

ANKARA

The Turkish unemployment rate in December last year decreased by 0.1 percentage point to 10.8 percent compared to the same period of 2014, the Turkish Statistical Authority (TurkStat) reported on Tuesday.

The employment rate rose slightly over the year to 45.4 percent in the last month of 2015, TurkStat reported.

Turkey’s labor force participation rate rose 0.7 percentage points in December year-on-year, to 50.9 percent. This translates into 865,000 persons joining the labor force.

The number of women participating in the workforce increased 1.2 percentage points from the previous year to 31.2 percent.

Among the segment of the labor force aged between 15 and 64, the unemployment rate also decreased by 0.2 percentage points compared to the same period of 2014.

The country's youth unemployment rate decreased by one percentage point to 19.2 percent in the last month of 2015.

Tuesday’s report also shows the amount of people who worked without any social security related to their main job was 32.1 percent with a 1.1 percentage point decrease in December compared to the same month of 2014.

"The unemployment rate caused no surprise, above from the previous level of 10.5 percent and below both market and our expectations of 11.0...," ALB Securities analyst Enver Erkan said.

“Our concerns had focused on the negative effect of the refugee crisis and the huge increase in the minimum wage... We will see the real negative impacts of the minimum wage increase in 2016 data. This will limit the employment increase and also increase unrecorded employment,” Erkan added.

Erkan said that the country's youth unemployment shows some improvement “but we think that this was caused by the decline of youth participation rate to labor force.

“We expect 3.3 percent GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2015; not enough to pull unemployment down. The unemployment rate is in an upward trend and this will remain in 2016,” he added.