Forecasting The Demographic Future of Türkiye By Probabilistic Projections

Abstract

Türkiye has a strong and rapid developed literature and experience on population projections. Probabilistic population projections have become popular in the last decade against the tradition deterministic approaches. Although Türkiye is not a EU member country and historical data based on administrative registers has a short time span, the recent developments in technical expertise and improvements in data sources deserve practical studies on probabilistic projections with realistic assumptions that can provide a technical guidance for the future activities and policy-making. In this thesis, implementations of probabilistic population projection approaches for Türkiye with cohort-component method are being targeted. Country-specific demographic data is used. Timing of this thesis corresponds to the discussions on declining fertility levels, policy implementations due to those developments, changing mortality pattern especially after COVID-19 episode and the uncertainty of migration flows. The main aim is to contribute to the demographic studies with a better understanding of more enlightened future, by a stronger “projector” that performs under maintenance of better technical abilities. The preliminary results based on calculations by basic level assumptions similar to the most recent official population projections, which were applied by VBA (Visual Basic Applications) in Excel together with 2000 simulations, indicate that probabilistic approaches provide relatively wider but statistically more robust ranges than current deterministic projections on the uncertainty of future. The results have been shown to make significant contributions to policy making regarding the success of the envisaged policies (fertility, youth, elderly, gender, schooling).