Quality of life drops in the north

UNEMPLOYMENT, unmanageable personal debt and environmental degradation are causing a drastic drop in the quality of life for Turkish Cypriots in the north, a report published yesterday claimed.
“Around sixty per cent of people say they are now eating into savings to pay debts and household bills,” Muharrem Faiz, head of market research company KADEM, said.
“Around ten per cent cannot even pay for their basic needs, and another 40 per cent say they are having serious problems making ends meet,” Faiz added.
KADEM, which also conducts the EU’s Eurobarometer survey in the north, reveals a depressing economic outlook for the unrecognised breakaway state. According to Faiz, whose researchers carried out face-to-face interviews with 1,144 residents in the north, it is not only the global economic crisis that is biting, but also Turkey’s insistence on handing down austerity measures on the community.
“Salaries for state employees have been frozen for three years. Meanwhile the cost of living has been steadily increasing,” Faiz said yesterday.
With the majority of Turkish Cypriots, either directly or indirectly, dependent on ‘state’ payments, the freeze on pay increases is having a marked effect on the overall economy.
“There are 72,000 households in north Cyprus, and each month the government writes 63,000 cheques. It is therefore easy to see the importance of payments from the state sector on the economy as a whole. They are what keep the economy afloat,” Faiz said.  He added that the “unintentional effect” of Ankara’s efforts to limit ‘state’ spending in the north was effectively “paralysing the economy”. Faiz said however that his report, rather than putting blame solely on Ankara, sought to highlight “systematic problems” in the Turkish Cypriot economy.
“The fact that we have a system where the majority work for the state is not the fault of ordinary people, yet it is the ordinary person who is suffering as a result,” he said. This is borne out by the figures in KADEM’s survey which says 70 per cent of Turkish Cypriot have difficulties paying debts. Around 43 per cent, the report says, have “serious problems” with debt.
Along with debt, unemployment ranked highly among Turkish Cypriots with 66 per cent rating it as a “serious problem”. Just under 50 per cent rated it as a “very serious problem”.
According to figures provided earlier by KADEM, unemployment in the north stands at around 13 per cent. The rates are however higher for the 18 to 24 age group for which the figure rises to 24 per cent.  
Surprisingly for an island with little industrialisation, environmental problems also ranked highly among the gripes of Turkish Cypriots with 72 per cent saying the quality of the natural environment had declined. Seventy per cent of those questioned complained of bad air quality. Air pollution in the north usually has little do with industrial output but from the burning of household waste as a means of disposal.

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