Turkey: Economic confidence jumps in May

ANKARA

Turkey's economic confidence index improved sharply to 61.7 in May, the country's statistical authority said on Thursday.

The May figure jumped 20.4% from 51.3 last month, amid Turkey’s normalization from the waning coronavirus pandemic, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) data showed.

The month-on-month rise was driven by improvements in the consumer, real sector, services, retail trade, and construction confidence indices.

The construction confidence index surged the most from last month, at 31.1%.

The service and consumer confidence indexes followed with 10.8% and 8.5% rises, respectively.

The retail trade confidence index also saw a 5% increase.

The economic confidence index is a composite index that encapsulates consumers' and producers' evaluations, expectations, and tendencies about the general economic situation, according to TurkStat.

It indicates an optimistic outlook about the general economic situation when the index is above 100, while it shows a pessimistic outlook when below 100.