Turkey’s unemployment rate hits highest since February 2011

Unemployment rate in Turkey has reached 10.5 percent, the highest since 2011, says a government report.

The Turkish Statistical Institute, TurkStat, said on Monday that the country’s unemployment rate stood at 10.5 percent in September.

The figure for August, published last month, stood at 10.1 percent.

The Hurriyet daily reported that the country’s unemployment rate is at its highest since February 2011, and the youth unemployment rate is at 19.1 percent.

The recent statistics follow last week’s decline in the Turkish lira value and the announcement of discouraging third-quarter growth.

The number of unemployed people over the age of 15 grew to 3.06 million from 2.94 million in the previous period.

Earlier this month, TurkStat reported that the country’s economy had grown less than earlier expectations in the third quarter of 2014 due to lackluster domestic demand and poor agricultural output.

The country’s economy was expected to grow at 2.8 percent.

Turkey’s growth rate for the second quarter of 2014 slowed to 2.1 percent — way below the double-digit growth rates at the beginning of the decade and shy of the government’s own target of four percent.