Seyfettin Gürsel and Onur Altındağ
TURKSTAT released short-term business statistics of production and capacity utilization rate in the manufacturing industry on 8 and 10 December 2009. According to the raw data, Industrial Production Index increased by 6.5% in October compared to same month of the previous year and by 13.7% compared to previous month. Following this strong rebound, Capacity Utilization Rate decreased by 1.1 percentage points in November month-on-month and 2.2 percentage points year-on-year. These conflicting signals from the manufacturing industry seem to align once we correct the data for calendar and seasonal effects.
Seasonally adjusted and working day corrected numbers indicate that Industrial Production Index in October rose by 2.9 percent month-on-month compared to September. Note that this number is the highest increase since April 2009, the beginning of the recovery in the industrial production. Similarly, seasonally adjusted and working day corrected Capacity Utilization Rate increased by 0.7 percentage points from October to November. Remember that we observed 2.8 percentage points of month-on-month increase in Capacity Utilization Rate from September to October. We conclude that the industrial production shows signs of recovery during the last quarter of 2009. Nevertheless, one should interpret these numbers carefully since we need support from the upcoming numbers to confirm this intuition.
doc. ResearchBrief057
pdf. ResearchBrief057