Natural Increase/Decrease in Turkey: Is Turkey Starting to Follow the European Pattern?

In Europe today there is virtually no population growth from natural increase because the crude birth and death rates are equal. Seventeen European countries have more deaths than births (i.e. natural decrease), including three of Europe’s four most populous nations (Russia, Germany and Italy). Of Europe’s four largest countries, only Turkey has more births than deaths.

Demographic research on the rate of natural increase (RNI = crude birth rate minus crude death rate, divided by 10) for European countries has mainly been conducted at the national level. But research on natural increase and decrease has indicated that it is at the subnational level where the phenomenon of natural decrease (more deaths than births) first begins to appear.

In our paper, we analyze the RNIs among the 81 subnational units, i.e., provinces, of Turkey for each year from 2000 to 2014. We first describe the RNIs for Turkey’s provinces for each year. These descriptive analyses will inform us if some of Turkey’s provinces are moving toward having more deaths than births. Turkey presently has the highest RNI of all of Europe, at 1.2 %. But it may well be that some of its provinces are moving toward negative RNIs, or, perhaps may already have negative RNIs. Then we will estimate two multivariate regression equations, one for the provinces of Turkey for the year of 2000, the other for the year of 2014. The dependent variable will be the RNI and our independent variables will focus on age structure and fertility.  We hypothesize that as the proportion of elderly in a province increases, the RNI will decrease. And we expect to find that as the fertility rate of the province increases, the RNI will increase.