Thirty percent of those who left Turkey to live abroad were from the country’s largest city of Istanbul, which accounts for roughly one sixth of the Turkish population, opposition newspaper Sözcü quoted data from the Presidential 2020 Programme as saying.
Emigration from Turkey increased by 42.5 percent in 2017 compared to the previous year, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat).
There are 25,000 Turks living in Greece, 12,000 in Macedonia and 2,000 in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, Diken said.
A total of 6.5 million Turks live abroad, the Presidency’s data said.
The same data indicates that the number of Syrian refugees living in Turkey has reached 3.7 million, 63,000 of whom are living in camps and the remainder throughout Turkey’s 79 provinces.
Syrian women have a fertility rate of 5.3 children, it said, referring to the average live births a woman has between the ages of 15 and 49.
Meanwhile, the fertility rate of Turkish women dropped to 1.99 in 2018 from 2.07 in 2017, according to TurkStat.