Türkiye’nin Demografik Geçiş Sürecine Coğrafi Bir Yaklaşım

Abstract

Substantial social and economic changes in recent human history can be seen as the dynamics of modern society. Fertility declined dramatically throughout the world because of the socio-economic transformation of the population during the past century. Meanwhile, mortality decline everywhere appears to have spearheaded to the fertility decline. Thus, the demographic transition has been comprehended as a global process. In this sense, it can be stress out that those geographic investigations in population studies gained much more importance in the course of time. In the developing world fertility did not seem to follow expected pattern. In other words, contrary to the developed countries, the developing world has experienced the demographic transition rapidly. Turkey’s demographic transition model, as one of the developing countries, indicates that the population structure of its country has started to converge to the population structure of developed countries. With a geographical approach, the aim of the present study is to reveal fertility and mortality declines at a provincial level in the light of the demographic transition theory. This study mainly based on population statistics issued by the United Nations, and the Turkish Statistical Institute. Onset of fertility transition-patterns of the provinces were determined by means of the percentage changes in child-woman ratios that had been issued following the censuses. It can be pointed out that, referring to the conclusion, fertility and mortality declines have been pervasive at a national level especially throughout the second part of the twentieth century. But in fact, the province-level data indicate that substantial regional variations in fertility and mortality reductions exist in the country

Keywords

• demographic transition
• demographic transition theory
• fertility
• mortality
• population geography
• turkey