“The world is getting ahead of itself by saying that things are getting better,” says Murat Yülek, chairman of PGlobal Global Advisory and Training Services and former World Bank economist, who described sentiment as being “overly optimistic” when it posits there will be a full recovery by 2011. Nowhere is this more true, he said, than when it comes to Turkey. “I was expecting the second half to be stronger than what it is now,” he said, “but when we look at indicators right now, I do not see what I was expecting.”
The fact that the latest industrial output and capacity growth figures for July and August (which clocked in at 6.3 percent and 9.7 percent, respectively) are being compared with those from the second half of last year -- when the economic decline first became pronounced -- is further indication that things are not improving as much as had been hoped.
“The real picture will only be seen when we see October and November figures,” Yülek said. The crisis was widely recognized as having begun in September, when Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and markets began to plummet. “I am frustrated with the strength of the recovery that we are seeing in the second half,” he said, adding that industrial production figures would be some of the key figures determining the crisis’ status.
But he, like TİSK and others that Today’s Zaman spoke with, felt that employment would remain the laggard in the recovery. “We should forget about employment [when assessing the recovery]. The responsiveness of employment figures will be very, very sluggish,” he said. “Employment just started to increase,” Bahçesehir University Center for Economic and Social Research (BETAM) President Seyfettin Gürsel said, “but not sufficiently to absorb labor force increase.” He noted that growth had to average about 5.5 percent if it was to absorb the ever-growing labor force.
And the haphazard recovery in industrial production and capacity utilization rates did not lead Gürsel to believe that there was any cause for celebration. Given the flat production figures over the last couple of months, he warned that employment may actually increase next year. He said Turkey was far from out of the woods. “We have reached the bottom, but because of the lagging production, the lack of a strong recovery and structural increases in employment stemming from demographic changes, the crisis in employment will lag,” he said.
