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Turkey's GDP growth in 2016 stands at 2.9 percent

Xinhua, March 31, 2017 Adjust font size:

Turkey's annual growth rate was at 2.9 percent in 2016, higher than expectation, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute on Friday.

In the fourth quarter of 2016, Turkey's economy grew at 3.5 percent, higher than the experts' median prediction, 2.4 percent.

The World Bank forecasted the country's growth rate at 2.1 percent for 2016; rating agency Moody's predicted two percent.

Despite of the coup attempt and the currency fluctuations last year, economic recovery is mainly due to a significant rise in consumption, local analysts say.

Expanding of automotive sales in the last quarter ahead of a then-planned tax hike and the acceleration in construction investment made a positive impact over the economic growth, daily Hurriyet said.

Data also showed that household consumption expenditure increased 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016 compared with the same quarter of the previous year.

According to the TurkStat report, Turkey's GDP was around 2.59 trillion Turkish liras (some 856.8 billion U.S. dollars) in 2016, compared with 2.34 trillion Turkish liras (around 861.5 billion U.S. dollars) the previous year.

The decline in terms of U.S. dollars was due to harsh fluctuations the Turkish lira encountered last year.The U.S. dollar/Turkish lira exchange rate was 3.02 on average last year while one dollar was traded for 2.71 liras in 2015.

"The Turkish economy grew much better than expected in 2016. Recovery was extremely fast in times when we had shocks and coups," Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek said in a written statement.

"We expect recovery in the last quarter of 2016 in our economy to continue throughout 2017," he added.

Deputy Prime Minister Nurettin Canikli said that the strong last quarter GDP data was the result of a number of measures to boost domestic and foreign demand and to ease liquidity squeeze in the markets.

Canikli predicted that this positive trend will continue, and Turkey will grow higher than four percent in 2017. Endit