Ankara, March 22: Recovery in the Turkish economy is expected to be stronger than initially projected given recent improvement in economic activity, a senior Turkish official was quoted as saying Sunday.
“In our 2010 mid-term programme, we envisaged a growth of 3.5 percent. But as of today, the figure is projected… between 3.7 and 5.5 percent,” said Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan, who holds the economy portfolio, Anatolia news agency reported.
Babacan said annual contraction in gross domestic product (GDP) last year was also expected to be smaller than the 6.0-percent projection.
“Recovery in the past three months shows that… the Turkish economy has contracted less than six percent, below the expectations,” he said.
The global crisis has plunged Turkey’s once-booming economy into recession, causing GDP to contract by 8.4 percent in the first nine months of 2009.
The fourth-quarter figures will be released on March 31, Babacan said.
“We will come to the pre-crisis level at the end of 2011. But even this pace of recovery is faster than the world average,” he said.
The minister however stressed that unemployment remained a major challenge given the country’s growing population, adding that reducing the jobless rate to under 10 percent by the end of 2011 appeared “difficult”.
Turkey’s unemployment rate stood at 13.5 percent in the three months to the end of January, according to latest official data.
In 2009 the rate rose to 14 percent, up three percentage points from the previous year.
Earlier this month, Ankara said it had called off loan talks with the International Monetary Fund because of “Turkey’s outlook as a country that is able to stand on its own feet economically.”
The decision ended nearly two years of negotiations on a stand-by deal dogged by disagreement on key issues.
—Agencies