Turkish Statistical Institute

Turkey's largest state-owned lender, Ziraat Bank, has proposed opening the first foreign-owned bank branch in Ethiopia, Turkish Economy Minister Nihat Zeybekci has said.

Speaking at the Turkey-Ethiopia Business Forum in Ankara on April 27, Zeybekci said Turkish lender Ziraat Bank was awaiting a response from Ethiopia on its proposal.

House sales across Turkey were up over 32.4 percent in March, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜ?K) said in a statement on April 24.

Housing sales in Turkey surged nationwide in March following an increase of 15 percent in February and a drop of 1.7 percent in January, the statement said.

Consumer confidence in Turkey recovered by 1.5 percent in April from a six-year low in March, with improvements in the probabilities of savings and unemployment expectations, according to the Consumer Confidence Index data released by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜ?K) on April 22.

The decline in inflation will become more pronounced during the second half of the year after a partial correction in food prices, Turkish Central Bank Governor Erdem Ba?ç? said on April 18, according to the Bank's website.

Urbanization, combined with the demand for higher quality buildings, is driving growth in Turkey's construction industry, analysts have told state-run Anadolu Agency, amid speculation that the sector is a bubble set to burst.

"If the GDP growth slows down in the first quarter and a significant recovery cannot be maintained in the following quarters, 2015 will be a year during which Turkey grows below its potential. This really matters, as we all know. The GDP growth has been slowing down since 2011 and the country has already been growing under its real potential.

Consumer prices in Turkey increased 1.2 percent in March over the previous month, data showed on April 3, as rising food costs pushed inflation well above market expectations.

?The main reason behind the rise in the headline inflation is food prices,? Gizem Öztok Alt?nsaç, chief economist at Garanti Securities, was quoted as saying by Reuters.

The title could have confused anyone following Turkish data. After all, at 2.6 percent annually, growth for the fourth quarter of 2014, which was released on March 31, came in significantly higher than expectations of 2.1 percent. Figures for the second and third quarters were revised up, and 2014 growth turned out to be 2.9 percent.

Turkey's exports fell 13.4 percent year-on-year in March to $11.23 billion, mainly due to continuing fragilities in the European markets and the fall in euro-dollar parity, the Turkish Exporters' Assembly (T?M) said April 1.

T?M releases its figures almost a month before the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜ?K), and the two sets of data usually match.

Out of the roughly 40 million tourists who visited Turkey last year, around half a million came for surgical procedures ranging from hair transplants and liposuction to cancer and orthopedic treatment, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜ?K).