According to data from the Undersecretariat of Foreign Trade, the Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat), and the Ministry of Education, Turkey’s indicators of social well-being have mostly been performing well, providing an alternative measure of development to gross domestic product (GDP) growth alone.
Average life expectancy was 70.9 in 2003, increasing to 71.3 in 2005 and further increasing to 71.9 in 2008. For women, who generally live longer than men, the life expectancy in 2003 was 73.4 years, increasing to 74.3 in 2008. Men’s life expectancy showed a similar increase from 68.6 in 2003 to 69.4 years in 2008. Infant mortality rates, an indicator of the overall health condition of a country, are still at a high 21 deaths per 1,000 live births, or 110th in the world according the United Nations population division. The indicator, however, has shown great progress, decreasing from 25.6 in 2003 to the current 21.
Schooling rates, or the total number of students in a specific level of education divided by the population in that schooling level’s age group, increased for primary education, though wavering between 91 and 90 percent between 2002 and 2007, while spiking to 97.4 percent in 2008. Secondary education schooling rates also increased nearly 10 percentage points, from 50.6 percent in 2002 to 58.6 in 2008, while higher education schooling rates increased from 14.7 to 21.2 in the same period.
Indicators of household income and wealth beyond annual income also improved. Electric consumption per capita increased from 1581 kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2003 to 2264 kWh in 2008, an impressive 43.2 percent increase. Car ownership increased dramatically even with Turkey’s title as the country with the highest per-liter gasoline costs in the world, from 66.5 cars per 1,000 people in 2003 to 91.7 in 2007. The number of telephones per 1,000 people actually decreased from 267 in 2003 to 258 in 2007, as cell phone service swept the country and provided more than 90 percent of the country’s land area access to cellular networks.
