The Turkish Statistics Institute (TUIK) announced last week that Turkey’s economy contracted by 13.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2009, compared to the same quarter last year. The figure recorded, was the largest quarterly contraction on record.
Turkish exports declined a whopping 41 per cent in the year to May while imports collapsed a staggering 43.9 per cent according to TUIK. The economic figures released, are much worse than expected.
GDP shrank 6.2 percent in the fourth quarter and grew just 1.1 percent last year as a whole. But the nightmare scenario doesn’t end there. The World Socialist Website exposes even more atrocious realities behind the latest figures:
“In terms of real GDP, this figure marks the steepest quarterly decline in economic growth since 1945, when the economy was in depression due to the Second World War.
When calculated in terms of the US dollar, the contraction in the Turkish economy is 29 percent. This is mainly due to a loss of value suffered by the overvalued currency (Turkish lira) under conditions of economic crisis. Before October 2008, when the tidal wave of the global crisis first reached the shores of the country, an overvalued lira was used to inflate the country’s GDP in dollar terms.”
As the Turkish economy slides downhill, unemployment climbs uphill, with the jobless rate surging to 16.1 percent in the first quarter, the highest since the measure began in 2005.
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