Seyfettin Gürsel, Hamza Mutluay, Mehmet Cem Şahin
As of 2021, Turkstat decided to publish labor market statistics of the respective month and they published the data of January 2021 on March 10, 2021. Turkstat started publishing individual monthly labor market estimates instead of 3-month moving average estimates with the new revision. Previously, it took about 70 days to announce the basic labor market estimates of the reference month; however, it takes about 40 days since 2021. The shortening of the delay in the publication of the estimates is undoubtedly beneficial to follow the current trends in the labor market in a timely manner. Nevertheless, Turkstat also publishes the 3-month labor market figures since the sample size used for calculating the monthly estimates fails to be sufficient for some labor market indicators. The 3-month labor market statistics provide more information about the labor market developments as they include data on the education levels and occupational breakdowns as well as employment at work and weekly working hours data. Also, occasional big fluctuations in the monthly sectorial and gender employment statistics, are not present in these series. In addition to the monthly Labor Market Outlook (LMO) reports, Betam started to additionally publish 3-month LMO reports considering these features.
In 2021 Q4, employment rose by 740 thousand, and the number of employed at work persons increased by 1 million 200 thousand with respect to the previous quarter. In this period, the number of unemployed persons declined by 78 thousand, the unemployment rate fell by 0.5 percentage point to 11.2%. The limited decrease in the number of unemployed persons as opposed to the strong rise in employment points to the acceleration of entry to the labor market and getting back to normal. Female employment rose by 306 thousand, whereas male employment increased by 433 thousand, the female and male unemployment rates declined by 0.3 and 0.5 points to 14% and 9.9%, respectively. Male employment increased in all the sectors while female employment fell only in construction sector. According to the seasonally unadjusted series, the general unemployment rate dropped in all the educational breakdowns, the female unemployment rate of “less than high school” graduates, and the male unemployment rate of “vocational high school” graduates rose. It is noteworthy that the unemployment gap in gender breakdown is 12.1 points (more than twice) at the level of “vocational high school” and 7.3 points (close to double) at the level of “higher education“.
doc. QuarterlyLaborMarketOutlook2021Q4
pdf. QuarterlyLaborMarketOutlook2021Q4