The unemployment rate in Türkiye slipped 0.1 percentage points month-over-month to 8.5% in October, official data showed on Friday.
The number of unemployed people aged 15 and over was down by 27,000 to 3.03 million in October, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) said.
Joblessness stood at 7% among men and 11.3% among women.
Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz said the strong outlook in the Turkish labor market continues, stressing that the unemployment rate, which he says has remained in single digits for 30 months, reinforced confidence in the economy.
The TurkStat data showed employment increased by 185,000 in October, bringing the total number of employed people to 32.77 million.
The overall employment rate was up to 49.2%, with rates of 66.5% for men and 32.4% for women.
The data showed the labor force participation rate rose 0.2 percentage points to 53.8%, while a seasonally adjusted measure of labor under-utilization increased 1.1 percentage points to 29.6%.
Youth unemployment, covering those aged 15 to 24, rose 0.2 percentage points to 15.6% in October. It was 12.9% for men and 20.6% for women.
In the third quarter of the year, the unemployment rate stood at 8.5% on average.
“In addition to incentive programs implemented for the employment of young people and women, we continue to take steps to facilitate women’s working lives, accelerate young people’s transition from education to employment, and reduce idle labor within the framework of our inclusive development goal,” Yılmaz wrote on Turkish social media platform NSosyal.
He said they expect Türkiye to be among the high-income countries as of this year, emphasizing that they will continue to support employment in labor-intensive sectors while implementing policies to strengthen the qualifications and skills of human capital and increase labor productivity to ensure its sustainable position.
“With the increase in labor force participation rate projected in our program over the next three years, we expect employment to increase by an average of 842,000 people annually, and the unemployment rate to gradually decline to 7.8% in 2028,” he said.
“We aim to increase the purchasing power of our citizens and improve income distribution through a sustainable and employment-supporting growth path aligned with our disinflation program,” he added.
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