Turkey's unemployment rate reaches new height
Turkey's unemployment rate has risen to 13.8%, according to the country's official auditing agency.
This raises the number
of Turkish citizens without work to 4.4 million, the agency said.
It added that this is
the largest number of unemployed Turkish nationals to be registered in years.
The new unemployment
figure is almost double the figure registered in 2018. This means that the
number of unemployed people in Turkey rose by almost 1.9 million in the space
of one year.
Some observers
attribute the rise in the unemployment rate to what they describe as the
"misguided" policies of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Turkey's sacked
treasury minister Berat
Albayrak, Erdogan's son-in-law, had promised to reduce the number of the
unemployed before he was given his notice.
He said during the
last mayoral elections that he would offer jobs to up to 2.5 million.
Nonetheless, he ended up firing 789 people.
The rise in the number
of those without jobs boils down to the drop in investments and the
deterioration of conditions in important economic sectors, such as tourism and
agriculture.
A large number of real
estate projects have stopped. Unemployment in the agricultural sector rose to
16.5% of the workforce. This is the highest unemployment figure in this sector
since 2005.
Erdogan conceded
recently that he is no longer capable of creating jobs for university
graduates. This contradicts his initial pledges to find jobs for his country's
youth.
Meanwhile,
deteriorating economic conditions in Turkey have caused a large number of
companies to go bankrupt. The companies going bankrupt included an airline that
started operating in 2010.
