Unemployment rate decreases slightly in December

The Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat) released its latest Household Labor Force Survey, for December, on Monday. According to the survey, the unemployment rate for December 2009, measured via a three-month moving average of figures from November, December and January, was, however, 0.4 percentage points higher than the three-month period centered on November. After peaking at 16.1 percent in February of last year, the unemployment rate began to decrease until October, when it started to rise again.

The number of unemployed rose by 29,000 between December 2008 and December 2009 to reach 3.36 million. During the same period, the number of employed people in Turkey increased by 985,000 to 21.45 million. The unemployment rate stood at 13.5 percent in the period of December for the whole country, with the unemployment rate in urban areas remaining unchanged at 15.6 percent while agricultural unemployment declined by 1.5 percentage points year-on-year to 9.2 percent.

According to a research note from the Bahçeşehir University Center for Economic and Social Research (BETAM), the year-on-year drop in the unemployment rate in the December period stemmed mainly from a rise in agricultural employment. “After declining until 2008, employment in agriculture started to rise again with the recession in 2008 and 2009. As nonagricultural employment opportunities decreased, people stopped shifting from agriculture to other sectors and an artificial rise was observed in agricultural employment, which rose by 637,000 from December 2008 to December 2009. This extraordinarily high level hides a rise in the unemployment rate,” the report stated.

Nonagricultural unemployment decreased by 0.2 points in the same period, falling to 16.6 percent. This is a clear sign that the economic recovery is continuing at a slow pace, according to BETAM. The nonagricultural unemployment rate was 15.5 percent for men and 20.1 percent for women, a 0.3 percentage point drop for both compared to the December 2008 period.

According to the survey, the labor force participation rate was 47.6 percent in December 2009, a 1.1 percentage point increase over the same period of the previous year. The male participation rate was 70.2 percent in the December 2009 period, a 0.3 percentage point rise over the December 2008 period, while the female participation rate was 25.9 percent, up by 2 percentage points over the same period the previous year.

Of those who were employed in December 2009, 24 percent were working in agriculture while 20.3 percent were employed in industrial areas and 5.7 percent in the construction sector.

Half the total number of those employed worked in the service sector during this period. Between December 2008 and December 2009, employment in agriculture and construction rose by 2 and 0.2 percentage points, respectively, while industrial and service industry employment decreased by 0.5 and 1.7 percentage points, respectively, during the same period.

The share of employees who lack social security in the overall number of people employed rose by 1.2 percentage points to 43 percent, with agriculture having the highest rate at 85.3 percent. In the December 2009 period, the working-age population, or those over 15 years of age, rose by 868,000 to 52.08 million, while the labor force increased by 1.01 million to 24.81 million.