WE ARE POSTPONING RETIREMENT

Seyfettin Gürsel, Gökçe Uysal ve Ayşenur Acar

Executive Summary

The regulations allowing early retirement in 1990’s had made Turkey a country of young and early retired people. We have been seeking for reforms that will provide a solution for this unsustainable problem since 1999. Using data from the Income and Living Conditions Survey conducted by TURKSTAT, we show that the regulations which aim to postpone retirement age have started to kick in. We can clearly observe their impacts although still limited. Although the number of retired people above 35 years of age has increased from 5.800.000 to 7.100.000 between the years of 2006 and 2010, data indicates that both the number and the share of young retired people have declined. We observe that the number of retired people aged between the years of 35 and 49 has fell through 941,000 to 802,000 in the period under study and their share in the population has declined from 7.1% to 5.5%. It should be highlighted that women have significant role in this decline. Parallel to this decline in the share of the young, the share of retired people in the population aged above 50 years continues to increase.

Retirees are more likely to live in western regions of Turkey as expected as these regions are more populated. When we focus on the ratio of retirees to population aged above 35 years as an indicator for the density of retirees, the highest ratio belongs to East Marmara, followed by the Aegean. The lowest ratios are, as expected, in the Central East and Southeast regions.

doc. ResearchBrief155

pdf. ResearchBrief155