A WORK ON THE ROOT CAUSES OF RURAL MIGRATION: THE CASE OF TURKEY

Abstract

Abstract Rural migration is a common phenomenon observed in the population all across the world and especially the developing countries. Rural migration has historically been an important part of the urbanization process and continues to be significant in scale, even though migration rates appear to have slowed down in some countries. Agriculture and rural development are key to addressing the root causes of migration. By 2050, over half of the population in the least developed countries wills still live-in rural areas. Turkey is also a developing country, a result of industrialization and urbanization after 1950, has become a country where rural migration. To conduct scientific studies concerning rural migration in developing countries as Turkey is quite important. Because, this kind of studies, to a certain extent, put forward a country’s socio-economic development and change. The lack of data and its acquisition is one of the major problems in rural migration studies. Based on this point, the data of rural migration in Turkey were associated with the populations of towns and villages, which have negative net migration velocities (NMV), that is which are migration-sending, according to Turkish Statistical Institution (TSI) data, and accordingly, new and tangible data acquirement method was used in this study. In this study, it was concluded that there is an inverse correlation between the number of cattle (head), that of small cattle (head) and cultivated agricultural land (ha), moreover, there is a correlation in the shape of inverse N, between agricultural production value per capita (TL) and rural migration.