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Oya Narin, head of tourism association TTYD, said on April 27.
The next day business daily Dunya reported that the tourism industry’s losses were running at 80% due to cancellations of reservations by both foreign and domestic tourists, while the transaction losses of tourism agencies had reached 99%.
“The economic consequences of the coronavirus will continue to reverberate long after lockdowns are lifted. GDP growth is likely to rebound as restrictions are eased, but GDP levels will remain depressed for a while. More fundamentally, the virus will leave a legacy of higher debt and larger and more active governments. It may also intensify the growing pushback against globalization,” Neil Shearing of Capital Economics said on April 27 in a note entitled “The effects of the coronavirus will reverberate for decades to come”.
The official unemployment rate edged down to 13.6% in February​ from 13.8% in January.
“​This performance, despite relatively large job losses, is attributable to the downtrend in the labour force participation rate​, from 52.6% to 50.7% in this period vs the all-time high of 53.5% recorded in early 2019. This signals that people continue to leave the labour force, not a good sign regarding the perception of households,” Muhammet Mercan, chief economist at ING Turkey, said​ in a May 11 note.
Turkey’s total seasonally adjusted number of employed people fell by 767,000 in the three months to February, with a decline of 495,000 in February alone.
4.4.2​ Income dynamics
The poverty threshold for a four-person household stood at Turkish lira (TRY) 7,942 (7,045 in December) per month as of May while hunger threshold (minimum food expenditure for a four-person family) stood at TRY2,438 (TRY2,163 in December) and minimum cost of living for a single person was TRY2,961 (TRY2,650 in December), according to a monthly ​survey​ by the yellow labour union Turk-Is.
The monthly net minimum wage was TRY2,020 in 2019 and it was hiked to 2,324 for 2020.
Around 40% of Turkey’s labour force earns a minimum wage.
The Istanbul chamber represents some 20,000 companies. Around 60% to
28​ TURKEY Country Report​ June 2020 ​ ​www.intellinews.com