Turkish poverty rate continues downward trend, TurkStat reports

The number of Turkish citizens living on less than $2.15 a day fell in 2011 to record low levels, a study by the Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat) announced on Friday. The poverty numbers for 2011 show a dramatic improvement over a decade ago, with the number of individuals living on less than $2.15 a day at 3.04 percent in 2002, and those living on less than $4.30 a day at a staggering 30.3 percent. According to this, based on the $2.15-a-day poverty line of current purchasing power (CPP) rates, the percentage of extremely impoverished in 2010 was 0.21, while it was 0.14 percent in 2011. The number of citizens living on less than $4.30 a day fell from 3.66 percent in 2010 to 2.79 percent last year. The TurkStat report also reveals the continued persistence of a gap between rural and urban incomes, with the percentage of urban residents living on less than $4.30 a day in 2011 at 0.94 versus 6.83 percent in rural areas. In 2002, 4 percent were below that line in urban areas, while 38.82 percent were in rural areas. In 2011, the proportion of residents living below the $2.15 line was 0.02 percent in urban areas, whereas in rural areas it was 0.94 percent. In 2002, those numbers were 2.37 percent and 24.62 percent, respectively. Extreme wealth disparity remains an enduring feature of the Turkish economic landscape despite improvements in income earning at the lower end of the scale. In 2008, a study found the gap between the rich and poor in Turkey to be the highest among countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). There also exists a stark disparity between the economic situation of the country's east and west, with the residents of the country's Aegean and Marmara regions enjoying more than double the average annual income of the country's central and eastern provinces.