THE DECREASE IN UNEMPLOYMENT SLOWS DOWN
Seyfettin Gürsel, Yazgı Genç and Uğurcan Acar
Seasonally adjusted labor market data show that non-agricultural unemployment rate decreased by 0.1 percentage points in the period of February reaching 11.6 percent. The non-agricultural unemployment rate decreased from 13.9 to 11.6 in the last year as a consequence of high GDP growth in 2017. As result, the non-agricultural unemployment rate has decreased by 2.3 percentage points in the recent year. The reason behind this decrease has been the strong increase in non-agricultural employment. This increase continues along with GDP growth; from January 2018 to February 2018, employment increased by 60 thousand in manufacture, 49 thousand in the services and 3 thousand in construction. Betam’s forecasting model predicts that the non-agricultural unemployment will decrease by 0.1 percentage point to 11.5 percent in the period of March 2018.