Türkiye’s industrial output recorded a steep decline in February, official data showed Tuesday, in a setback demonstrating the scale of the earthquakes that ripped through the southeastern region.
The production dropped 8.2% year-over-year, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) said, marking the largest decrease since May 2020, the height of the global coronavirus pandemic.
Two quakes on Feb. 6, which also severely hit neighboring Syria, along with aftershocks, killed more than 50,000 people in Türkiye and flattened hundreds of thousands of buildings besides inflicting severe infrastructural damage.
The affected areas comprise nearly a tenth of the country’s output. The disaster caused about $34.2 billion in direct physical damage, or 4% of 2021 gross domestic product (GDP), according to World Bank estimates. It yet warned total reconstruction and recovery costs could be twice as high.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan put the total cost of the damage at around $104 billion.
TurkStat said the survey response rate was 67% in the quake-hit regions, where value-added tax (VAT) declarations were postponed, meaning alternative data sources were used. The authority calculates the industrial production index based on monthly surveys and VAT declarations.
Among subsectors, the mining and quarrying index plummeted by 18.2%, the manufacturing index decreased by 8.2% and the electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply index was down by 4.5% in February, compared to the same month last year, TurkStat said.
Month-over-month, Türkiye's industrial production fell 6% on a seasonal and calendar-adjusted basis in February.
