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Turkey to get older with 93 million people in 2050

Türkiye Materials 15 February 2013 13:14 (UTC +04:00)

Turkey's population will start to decline by 2050, after reaching a peak of 93.4 million, according to Turkey's Statistics Institute's (TÜİK) population projection, Hurriyet Daily News reported.

In 2023 Turkey's population will reach 84.2 million. After reaching its peak in 2050 with 93.4 million, the population will start to decline, and it is expected to be 89.1 in 2075, the data released by TÜİK yesterday showed.

However, if the average number of children per woman is 2.5 in 2050, the total population will be 119 million in 2075, according to one projection. The population in 2075 will be 89 million if the birth rate does not increase. Also, half of the population of Turkey will be over the age of 34 in 2023, the data showed.

The announcement came at a time when the Turkish government is pushing for measures to increase the number of children to at least three in each family.

The aging of the population is a serious problem which necessitates certain measures, according to Professor Seyfettin Gürsel, director of Bahçeşehir University Center for Economic and Social Research (Betam).

The critical time period when Turkey will start to see the results of aging will start after 2030, when the numbers of employed and of elderly people become almost equal, Gürsel told the Hürriyet Daily News in an interview yesterday.

If the current trends of demographic indicators persist, those over the age of 65, 5.7 million in 2012 with a proportion of 7.5 percent, will reach 8.6 million people with a proportion of 10.2 percent in 2023, said TÜİK.

"Population aging is a great problem. The elderly, this means those over 65, will probably be retired and not working and their burden will be on the shoulders of the employed people," said Gürsel. He said Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's efforts to incentivize having three children alone would not solve this problem.

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