Seyfettin Gürsel, Gokce Uysal and Furkan Kavuncu
Seasonally adjusted labor market data shows that in the period of January 2019, non-agricultural unemployment rate increased by 0.6 percentage points and reached 15.5 percent. The increase since the period of November 2018 in non-agricultural unemployment rate amounts to 1.9 percentage points. Such an increase is worrisome as it exceeds even the 1.5 percentage points rise in the period of July 15, 2016. In the period of January 2019, employment decreased in all sectors. From November 2018 to January 2019, that is, in the last three periods, employment losses reached 300 thousand in manufacturing and 150 thousand in services. As for construction, employment has decreased by 520 thousand since February 2018. Although non-agricultural labor force decreased, as it did in the past two periods, the number of unemployed in non-agricultural sectors rose to 4 million 193 thousand.