Turkey : Poverty and Coping After Crises, Volume 1. Main Report
Turkey experienced severe losses of life and infrastructure in 1999 caused by the August earthquake. The earthquake was followed by a period of economic and financial crisis, culminating in a major currency devaluation in February 2001. What has be...
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| Format: | Poverty Assessment |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
Washington, DC
2013
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2003/07/2486928/turkey-poverty-coping-after-crises-vol-1-2-main-report http://hdl.handle.net/10986/14624 |
| Summary: | Turkey experienced severe losses of life
and infrastructure in 1999 caused by the August earthquake.
The earthquake was followed by a period of economic and
financial crisis, culminating in a major currency
devaluation in February 2001. What has been the social
impact of these crises? In order to answer that question,
the World Bank and the Government of Japan co-financed a
household survey during the summer of 2001, which consisted
of surveying 4200 households on their consumption and
income, and interviewing 120 respondents in depth for case
studies. This study seeks to answer three main questions:
how many are poor in Turkey in 2001; who are the poor and
why are they poor?; and how do the poor cope with risk and
poverty?. The major effect of the crises has been an
increase in poverty in urban areas of Turkey from 1994 to
2001. Extreme poverty in all of Turkey has not changed, and
remains at low levels, but inequality is also unchanged at
quite high levels. A relatively large share (nearly
one-fifth) of the urban population has consumption below a
food standard, and qualitative evidence indicates that
poverty has worsened in rural areas as well. The report
concludes with the following policy recommendations:1)
Macroeconomic management to resume broad-based growth, which
should reverse the poverty trend since the vast majority of
the newly poor are not extremely poor 2) Counter negative
coping strategies of the poor by providing conditional cash
transfers 3) Expand job opportunities for the newly poor
through micro-projects and community development 4) Improve
targeting and coverage of the extreme poor and outreach to
them through institutional strengthening 5) Institute
regular poverty monitoring through household surveys and the
development of a poverty map. |
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