DM Monitoring
Ankara: The unemployment rate in Turkey rose slightly to 12.9% in the first quarter, according to official data Tuesday.
The seasonally adjusted rate was up 0.1 percentage point from the previous three months, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) said.
The number of unemployed people aged 15 and over increased by 142,000 to 4.1 million in the January-March period, the data showed.
At the same time, the labor underutilization increased to 27.8%, a 1 percentage point rise from the previous quarter.
The seasonally-adjusted underutilization rate, a reflection of how the coronavirus pandemic weighs on workers, had hit a record high of 29.5% in January. The previous peak, 29.3%, was in May last year during the most severe COVID-19 lockdowns. The employment rate was realized as 43.8%, a 0.8 percentage point quarterly rise as the number of employed people rose by 627,000 to 27.8 million.
