Turkey's population tops 78 million in 2015

ANKARA (AVRUPA TIMES) Turkey´s population increased in 2015 by 1,045,149, according to a report by the Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat) released Thursday.

According to the report, Turkey's official population was at 78,741,053 at the end of 2015. The study was conducted through the Address-Based Central Population Registration System (ABPRS), which uses the National Address Database to track the number of people living at registered addresses.

The population increased by 1.34 percent from the previous year, and was up by 1.33 percent in 2014. Males made up 50.2 percent (39,511,191) of the total population, while 49.8 percent (39,299,862) were females, according to the report.

According to the results, the proportion of the population living in provincial and district centers was 92.1 percent, up from 91.8 percent in 2014, the report said.

Istanbul - Turkey’s most crowded city with 18.6 percent of the population - had 14,657,434 official residents last year, according to the report. Istanbul is the country's most densely populated city with 2,821 people per square kilometer, the report said. The northern province of Bayburt had the country's smallest population with 78,550 residents, the report said.

Turkish capital Ankara was the country's second-most crowded city with 5,270,575 residents. The western province Izmir was third with 4,168,415, the country’s industry hub Bursa had a population of 2,842,547, and Antalya had 2,288,456 residents, the report said.

The eastern Anatolian city Tunceli had the lowest population density with 12 people per square kilometer.

There are 51,926,356 people in Turkey between the ages of 15 and 64; 67.8 percent of the total population, the report said. The population between the ages of 0 and 14 totaled 18,866,220.

People who are 65 and older make up 8.2 percent of the population, an increase of 7.7 percent from 2013, or 6,891,239 people