Poverty rate shrinks in southeast

ANKARA - Anatolia News Agency

The poverty rate in Turkey’s southeast region fell 2.2 points down to 11.5 percent in 2010, according to an Anatolia news agency report based on the “Revenue and Living Conditions Survey, 2010,” from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK).

The number of people who have a yearly household revenue that is 50 percent less than the median value determined for the region is 863,000. This figure was at 999,000 in 2009. The poverty rate in 2009 was 13.7 percent in the region, which has a high Kurdish population.

The reason for the decrease in the poverty rate stems predominantly from the social transfers toward the region, said the news agency.

A total of 13,414 households were visited for the survey. Some 8,832 of them were in urban areas, while the remaining households were in rural regions. Some 12,106 of the total households visited agreed to participate in the survey.

The survey also revealed that the number of people in poverty increased by 61,000 to 336,000 in the eastern Black Sea region. The poverty rate, meanwhile, rose 0.3 and 1 percent, respectively, in the western Marmara and western Anatolia regions.