Turkey's jobless rate at the end of 2009 reached a record high of 14 per cent, new government data has revealed.

The Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat) disclosed that the Eurasian country's unemployment rate at the end of a recession-battered year was three per cent more than in 2008 - with an additional 838,000 people losing their jobs.

According to Today's Zaman, Istanbul witnessed the highest increase in unemployment among the 26 regions of the country last year with more than 260,000 people joining the ranks of the jobless.

TurkStat also revealed that the three areas with the most joblessness were Adana-Mersin, Sanliurfa-Diyarbakir and Hatay-Kahramanmaras-Osmaniye with 22 per cent, 18.8 per cent and 18 per cent unemployment respectively

Meanwhile a study conducted by Istanbul's Okan University released earlier this week discovered that rising redundancies and falling job creation has placed Turkey as the second worst place in Europe for unemployment.

Spain tops the list with a jobless rate of 18 per cent, which is significantly higher than Europe's average of 8.8 per cent.