THE CHANGE IN THE ACTIVE AGEING INDEX IN TÜRKİYE IN THE 2008-2020 PERIOD: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS WITH EU COUNTRIES

Abstract

It is expected that an ageing population in Türkiye will have certain effects in the fields of working life, social security, health and education over time. Taking some measures for the aging population in the world have gained importance with increase in life expectancy such as keeping people in working life at older ages, policies to increase their quality of life. Active aging in the European Union has been monitored by the Active Aging Index (AAI) that has been used as a policy tool. The main purpose of this study is to calculate the overall AAI and the sub-indexes of Türkiye for the 2008-2020 period fort he first time. Another purposes of this study are to analyze the existing data sources and the changes in the index values for Türkiye .According to the results of this study, there has been an increase with 6.5 points in Türkiye's overall AAI score for last12 years. This progress indicates a very positive change in, especially when compared with the improvement in the EU average. It is observed that the domains contributed to the improvement in overall AAI value, are “Social participation” with 11.3 points increase, “Independent, healthy and secure living” with 9.7 increase points and “Capacity and enabling environment for active ageing" with 6.1 points increase, respectively. The domain where the capability and potential of the elderly population in Türkiye is utilized the least and which needs to be taken precautions, is the employment domain.