Life expectancy for Turkish citizens rises to 78.6 years

ISTANBUL

Average life expectancy at birth for a Turkish citizen increased to 78.6 years in the 2017-2019 period, the Turkish Statistics Institute (TÜİK) said on Sept. 17.

The statistics authority had calculated the average life expectancy for 2016-2018 as 78.3 years.

The research shows that the increase in life expectancy in the country has increased linearly over the past five years, and that Turkish citizens’ average life expectancy increased by 0.3 years each year.

Life expectancy is based on an estimate of the average age that members of a particular population group will be when they die.

According to TÜİK, women live longer than men by 5.4 years on an average.

The institute said life expectancy at birth was 75.9 years for men and 81.3 years for women versus 75.3 years and 80.7 years in the 2013-2015 period.

“For 15-year-olds, at the minimum age to start working, the average remaining life expectancy was 64.6, 62 years for males and 67.3 years for females,” it noted.

Data from the statistics authority also showed that the average remaining life expectancy at age 30 was 50 years (47.6 years for men and 52.5 years for women) and at age 50 was 30.9 years (28.6 years for men and 33.1 years for women).

“In Turkey for 65-year-olds, the average remaining life span was 18 years in the 2017-2019 years, 16.3 years for males and 19.6 years for females. In other words, for 65-year-olds, women are expected to live 3.3 years more than men on average,” TÜİK explained.

The indicator of “healthy life years,” defined as the number of years of life at a certain age without health problems limiting their activities of daily life, was calculated for age zero as 58.3 years for the total population, 59.9 years for males and 56.8 years for females in Turkey.

“Accordingly, it was found that the healthy life years at birth of males were 3.1 years longer than those of females,” it said.

The statistics institute noted that life tables - also known as mortality tables - explain probabilities of mortality and duration of survival at any age of the population in detail.

According to the address-based population system, Turkey’s population was 83.1 million as of end-2019.

The annual population growth rate decreased to 13.9 per thousand in 2019 down from 14.7 per thousand in 2018.

The proportion of the population residing in province and district centers increased to 92.8 percent in 2019 from 92.3 percent in 2018, according to the latest statistics TÜİK announced.