According to the latest Household Labor Survey, released on Monday by the Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat), the number of unemployed in Turkey increased by 927,000 in August over the same month of 2008 and reached 3.43 million, representing a 3.2 percent increase. The report showed that the unemployment rate in urban areas increased by 4.3 percentage points and totaled 16.5 percent in August, while it was 7.4 percent in rural areas, a figure 1.3 percentage points more than that in August 2008.
Between August 2008 and August 2009, Turkey’s total non-institutional population (i.e., excluding students, prisoners and those serving in the military) increased by 815,000, reaching 70.64 million; in this group the number of those of working age increased by 873,000 and totaled 51.79 million.
The labor force participation rate, increasing by 1 percentage point over the same month of the previous year, reached 49.3 percent in August 2009. For the same month, the labor force participation rate of males totaled 71.9 percent, rising by 0.4 percentage points over August 2008, while the labor force participation of females increased by 1.6 percentage points to 27.5 percent in August this year compared to same month of last year. When assessing the active labor force and the unemployment rate, TurkStat does not count those who are not actively seeking work.
During the same period, the number of employed individuals increased by 40,000, reaching 22.11 million, while the number of workers in the agricultural sector increased by 232,000; employment figures in the nonagricultural sector fell by 192,000.
Of the population working in August, 26.5 percent were employed in agriculture, 18.8 percent in industry, 6.2 percent in construction and 48.5 percent in the service sector. The figures show a 1 percentage point increase in agricultural sector workers, a 0.1 percentage point increase in construction sector workers and a 0.6 percentage point increase in service sector workers during the period between August 2008 and August 2009, while industrial labor decreased by 1.7 percentage points.
