By Muhammed Ali
ANKARA
At the end of last Turkey's population rose to striking distance of 80 million, said official data released Tuesday.
Turkey’s population as of last Dec. 31 was over 79.8 million, said the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat).
This represented a rise of over 1.07 million people in 2016 and an annual growth rate of 1.35 percent over the previous year.
According to TurkStat, Turkey’s male population was 40.04 million (50.2 percent of the total), while its female population was 39.8 million (49.8 percent).
According to the state’s address-based population registration system, 92.3 percent of Turkey’s population lives in cities and district centers, compared to 7.7 percent in rural areas.
In 2016, Turkey's most populous city was Istanbul with 14.8 million people – fully 18.5 percent of the country’s total population -- followed by the capital Ankara with 5.3 million people and Izmir on the Aegean coast with 4.2 million.
Bursa, one of Turkey's prominent industrial centers, was Turkey’s fourth-biggest city by population with 2.9 million, and popular tourist spot Antalya came in fifth with 2.3 million people.
Turkey’s least populous city was Tunceli in southeastern Turkey with 82,193 inhabitants, followed by Bayburt (90,154) and Ardahan (98,335), both in northeastern Turkey.
TurkStat also found that Turkey’s working age population (age 15-64) rose 1.6 percent last year to reach 68 percent (around 54.2 million people), while the population of under-15s fell to 23.7 percent, even as the over-65 population rose to 8.3 percent.
