Migration Trends and Housing Standards: Looking at Turkey's Correlation

ECON 301

ECONOMETRICS GROUP PROJECT

Migration Trends and Housing Standards: Looking at Turkey's Correlation

The issue of migration or rather the troubles witnessed by fast and unplanned migration in Turkey has been a severely important, actual and effective one throughout the last few decades. The statistics for Turkey's migration reveal that the country has witnessed several waves of migration throughout its history and the reality of unbalanced, unplanned and extreme migration seems to continue to this day, leaving the rural parts of the country under-populated while flooding the larger cities millions of people every year.

In this assignment, we as a group will look at the statistical data in regards to migration in Turkey and show how the larger cities have been under the influence of such migration through data taken from the Turkish state institute, Turkiye Istatistik Kurumu (TUIK). We then will use data in regards to housing reality in Turkey to show that these mentioned waves of migration also have significant effects on housing statistics in Turkey, leaving these newly migrated people to live under poorer conditions than others in these big cities which create problems in these cities in terms of equality and opportunity. We will use statistical data from TUIK and use this data in STATA to come up with regressions between different variables that show how the data are inter-related and correlated with one another which support our claims.

The variables that we will be using are as following:

Totpop: total number of people living in each and every Turkish city (total of 81 cities).

Inmig: total number of people migrating into Turkish cities every year.

Outmig: total number of people migrating out of Turkish cities every year.

Netmig: the net number of people migrating into and out of every Turkish city.

Netmigrate: the net rate of migration witnessed in and out of every Turkish city.

Tothouse: total number of households in every Turkish city.

Ownhouse: total number of household owners in every Turkish city.

Tenhouse: total number of tenants in every Turkish city.

Lodgehouse: total number of lodgers in every Turkish city.

We will use the linear regressions between these variables, initially between the population statistics and then the migration statistics to show that the newly migrated people are at large renting houses, rarely can afford to buy houses and never can rent rooms, or lodge houses.

Our question in this sense would be, can we safely assume that the unplanned, unorganized and unbalanced migration regimes lead to differences in housing standards, or living standards, between migrants and locals?

Our data and our analysis show that the migrants are forced to rent houses given the current migration and housing realities, cannot buy houses or share houses with others. We believe that this is a significant statistical reality and has significant sociological and cultural implications.

This regression shows that every 3 people in 100 people are migrating into different cities every year on average. The P-value is 0.000, which is very significant, Standard Error is very low (.0005378) and the R² value is 0.972 which is very good.

This regression shows that every year, 2 people are leaving Turkish cities on average. The P-value is 0.000 which is very significant, Standard Error is very low (0.0003675) and R² value is 0.9834 which is very good.

Looking at these two data regressions, we see that every year each and every Turkish city loses 1 member of its population on average. This means that there is a constant trend of migration in Turkey. However, it is also important to note that these are numbers are on average and vary drastically between different cities (for example: Istanbul vs. Hakkari).

This regression gives us a