If you listen to politicians, the Turkish people live in prosperity… An abundance, a blessing!
But when you look at the official data of the state, the situation is disastrous! The poor cannot even maintain their position, they are getting poorer and poorer.
TurkStat announced yesterday the income distribution statistics for 2022, which were made in 2023, and we saw that nothing has fundamentally changed. The same trend continues.
Income distribution has deteriorated even more.
The Gini coefficient, which indicates equality in income distribution as it approaches zero and deterioration in income distribution as it approaches one, grew a little more. The Gini coefficient, which was 0.415 in 2021, rose to 0.433 in 2022. In fact, the coefficient has been growing continuously since 2018 (except 2020), meaning that income distribution is deteriorating.
Do you think the change in the form of government in 2018 has an impact on this trend?
The Gini coefficient according to the 2022 income level was 0.433, but this ratio is still viewed with skepticism.
The size of the informal economy makes it difficult to measure real income. As income increases, the tendency to hide it becomes more pronounced. This is an important factor that results in the Gini coefficient being measured lower than its actual level.
But let us assume that the measurement is accurate; nevertheless, the fact that there is a deterioration in income distribution from year to year is obvious.
Let us now look at how the incomes of the 5 percent groups have changed according to 2022 data.
The share of income of the poorest 5 percent groups has been the same for years. The share of these groups in income is 0.9 percent, 1.4 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively.
With the fourth 5 percent group, impoverishment starts to become more pronounced. The share of income of this group is already low, and the rate has gone down a little more in 2022.
Is it only theirs? In 2022, compared to 2021, everyone from the fourth 5 percent group to the last 20 percent became poorer.
The following thirteen 5 percent groups became poorer. In other words, 65 percent of households are poorer in 2022 than in 2021.
The income of the seventeenth and eighteenth groups remained the same.
Those who got richer? The last two 5 percent groups. You know, the last two groups that are already very rich. The income of the nineteenth 5 percent increased from 9.8 percent to 10.3 percent, and the income of the last 5 percent increased from 23.3 percent to 24.7 percent.
The share of the 95 percent in income is 75 percent
The remaining 5 percent, the share of that group is 25 percent
As a result, 95 percent get only 3 units of income, while 5 percent get 1 unit…
What a distribution; isn’t it wonderful…
The shares were uneven in previous years, but not as much as in 2022.
In the 2006-2021 average, the share of the 95 percent was 79 percent and the share of the last 5 percent was 21 percent.
The trend is very clear; the imbalance is getting stronger every year.
Now let’s think about it; what was the situation in 2023? In a year when the official inflation rate was over 9 percent in July and August, the two months historically had negative rates some years, and when the year was closed with 65 percent, would there be an improvement in the distribution of income? Of course we know what we are going through, but what do you think we will see when this situation is reflected in the data?
