According to official statistics released on Friday, Turkey’s population of seniors 65 and older has grown by 22.6% over the last five years and will total 8.45 million by 2022.
Elderly people now make up 8.45 million people, up from 6.89 million in 2017, or 9.9% of the entire population in 2022. In addition, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) reports that in 2017, the elderly population’s share of the total population was approximately 8.5%.
In 2017, 61.6% of the elderly population were in the 65–74 age bracket, followed by 29.7% of people in the 75–84 age bracket and 8.6% of people in the 85+ age bracket. 64.5% of the population in 2022 was between the ages of 65 and 74, 27.7% were between the ages of 75 and 84, and 7.9% were 85 years and older.
In 2022, there were 5,344 elderly people who were 100 years of age or older, making up 0.1% of the elderly population.
The 2022 statistics shared by TurkStat also indicated that women dominate the senior citizens’ age population with 55.6%, compared to 44.4% of the male elderly population.
TurkStat also emphasized that the country’s population’s age dynamics were constantly shifting and pointed out that Turkey is currently too close to the aging population threshold of 10% of the population being elderly. The institute, however, added that it was part of a “global aging process.”
Population forecasts predict that by 2030, the proportion of the elderly population will increase and reach 12.9%.
The aging population in Turkey is quite large in terms of numbers, even though it still has a sizable proportion of younger residents compared to nations with a higher elderly population. Population projections predict that the median age will be 35 years, 6 months in 2030, 38 years, 5 months in 2040, 42 years, 3 months in 2060, and 45 years in 2080.
According to the United Nations world population estimates, the world population for 2022 is estimated to be 7.975 billion and the elderly population accounts for nearly 783 million people.
As per the U.N.’s estimates, 9.8% of the world’s population was composed of the elderly last year. On the list of the top three nations with the highest percentage of elderly citizens, Japan came in first with 29.9%, followed by Italy, where 24.1% of the general population is over the age of 65. Finland came in last on the list with a senior citizen population of 23.3%.
The same year, Turkey came in at number 66 out of 184 nations. The northern province of Sinop, with a rate of 20.2% elderly people, had the highest elderly population in 2022. With 19.3% and 18.0% respectively, Kastamonu and Giresun, two other Black Sea coast provinces, followed Sinop in the rankings.
The southeastern provinces had the lowest percentage of the elderly in the population, with rnak, one of the youngest in the nation, having the lowest rate at 3.5%, ahead of its neighbors Hakkari and Sanlurfa, which had the highest rates at 4.0% and 4.1%, respectively.
According to TurkStat data for 2022, every fourth Turkish household had at least one person who was 65 years of age or older, and 1.63 million Turkish citizens who were considered to be elderly were estimated to be living alone. The western province of Burdur had the highest rate of elderly people living alone, with 35% as per data, while Hakkarı was at the list’s bottom, with 7.8%.
The education level of the elderly has increased at the same time as their population has. The percentage of elderly people who are illiterate decreased from 19.6% in 2017 to 14.4% in 2021, but the data also showed that the proportion of elderly women who are illiterate is still higher than that of the male population.
Overall, the elderly population’s literacy rate increased from 80.4% in 2017 to 85.6% in 2021.
The income and living conditions survey conducted by TurkStat revealed that the elderly population’s poverty rate decreased from 15.5% in 2017 to 11.4% in 2021.
Among the other data and life satisfaction surveys undertaken by TurkStat, it was revealed that some 57.7% of elderly individuals declare themselves as ”happy,” while the number of them being keen on new technologies and internet usage also grew from 11.3% to 36.6%, between 2017-2021.
