Mythbusting the population of northern Cyprus
Sapienta Cyprus Reflections series
Photo: Büyük Han in northern Nicosia. Source: Shutterstock purchase.
Welcome to Sapienta Cyprus Reflections, a sub-category of Sapienta Cyprus Snippets. It is free for now. You can read more about each series here.
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Now to the subject of today’s newsletter. On 6 September I interviewed Mete Hatay, of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) Cyprus Centre, about the size of the population in northern Cyprus. I did this because it is a highly sensitive subject and for all kinds of political reasons explained at the end of the podcast, there is a great deal of difference of opinion on both sides of the island about the size. This is not helped by the fact that there has been no census since 2011, when the population (de jure) was counted as 286,257.
Hatay has spent many years looking into this subject and making estimates, including cross-checking against other hard data to make sure that his estimates are solid. You can find his commentary and publications more generally here. And you can listen to my interview with him on the Figure It podcast, hosted by IslandTalks.fm, here, or search “Figure It” to download it onto your favourite podcast player.
For those of you who prefer to read your information, below is a summary of the facts and figures cited in the episode.
Let’s get straight to the point. Hatay believes that the population of northern Cyprus is around 500,000. This is higher than my most recent estimate of about 426,000 but lower than the “1 million”, “2 million” or even “6 million” one sometimes hears.
<Update: in November 2024 the Turkish Cypriot statistics institute published an official estimate for the civilian population in 2023 at 476,214. It was not too far off Mete’s 500k estimate, if you consider some of the other wilder figures that are bandied about.>
What country origins make up the population?
If you are a business selling sneakers, you probably do not care where the population comes from. If you are involved in the politics of northern Cyprus, or in trying to solve the Cyprus problem, you are going to care about what proportion of the total population has the right to vote, what proportion of the “original Turkish Cypriot voting population” has the vote, and what proportion of the population might be entitled to a united Cyprus citizenship. We discussed how arrived at the various numbers cited.
New census planned for 2025
As noted above, there has not been a census since 2011. Most economies conduct one every 10 years. Hatay said that the planned 2021 census had been postponed because of Covid-19, as well as budget problems, but that a new one was being planned for 2025.
The new one will be conducted using the more modern “atlas-based” approach. In 2011, the authorities conducted a survey by imposing a one-day curfew. This meant that the surveyors had only one chance to collect the data. If someone did not answer the door, that person’s household was not counted. The 2025 one will take place over three to four months and the aim is to get 100% coverage of all households.
The absence of a census has all kinds of knock-on effects. Without a realistic sense of the size of the population, you cannot plan for electricity demand, schools, hospitals and so on. It also means you might miss new housing conurbations in regular surveys like the labour force survey, which is conducted annually in northern Cyprus. The last Labour Force Survey conducted in October 2023 gave a civilian (non-military) population in northern Cyprus of only 380,917. However, because of the missing census but also, as Hatay explained, because of issues with registration, this can miss new conurbations and lead to underestimates.
After a lot of pushing, the Turkish Cypriot leader and president of the unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), Ersin Tatar, estimated the population in November 2023 at 410,000. This is still thought to be an underestimate. Suggestions for what the real figure be vary enormously.
Why it is unlikely to be 1 million
We then tackled a number of figures to test the suggestion that the population could be as high as 1 million and why that seemed unrealistic.
The first reason which I mentioned is the physical evidence of one’s eyes. The population in the southern part of the island in 2022 is reported as 920,700. If the population were 1 million in the north, it would mean approximately the same population as the south but packed into just over one-third of the area, so the north would be three times more densely populated than the south. You only have to visit to see that the north is simply not that packed a place.
Another figure we examined was the report that there are 811,893 active mobile phone subscriptions in the north. This turns out not to be problematic. The Republic of Cyprus Statistical Service (Cystat) reports 1,512 mobile phone subscriptions per 1,000 people. In other words, in the south there are 1.5 subscriptions per person.
If you assume that the ratio is the same in the north, you divide 811,893 by 1.5 and you get around 540,000 people. This is closer to the 500,000 number that Hatay estimated than it is to 1 million.
There are also reasons to believe that the mobile number ratio could be higher in the north than in the south. Hatay noted that there is “a lot of mobility” of people coming and going – 35,000 Turkish soldiers rotating, for example, as well as business people, migrant workers who come and go, and students.
As I pointed out in the podcast, if you have a Turkish mobile phone number issued in Turkey, you pay roaming rates in northern Cyprus, therefore you are incentivized to get a local number if you are a staying longer than a few days.
Let’s say if the mobile phone ratio is a little higher than the south, at 1.6. This means that 811,893 active mobile phone subscriptions implies a population of 811,893/1.6 = around 507,000.
We then looked at the number of registered cars. Notwithstanding a spate of care sales linked to property sales, which I forgot to mention in the podcast, the Turkish Cypriot media reported in June 2023 that there were 370,000 vehicles in northern Cyprus.
In the south, the number of licensed vehicles in 2022 was reported by Cystat at 789,199. With a population of 920,700, this gives a ratio of all vehicles (including commercial vehicles) to the resident population of about 86%.
If the ratio of vehicles to the population is also 86% in northern Cyprus, then we have a population of 370,000/0.86 = 430,000. This seems on the low side based on Hatay’s estimates. However, the vehicle ownership ratio is likely to be lower in the north than the south because of the difference in per-capita incomes. Hatay pointed out that the 370,000 figure for the north also includes “graveyard” cars that are no longer in use.
So let’s say (my assumption) that the vehicle ownership ratio is more like 75% in the north. That would produce a population of 370/0.75 = 493,000.
Housing stock
We then looked at housing stock. Hatay said that the housing stock (by which I think he meant non-tourist housing stock but was unable to check in time) was around 186,000 units. He said that this would bring the population to around 450,000 or 500,000 but noted that there were also students living in dormitories. A population of 450,000 in housing stock of 186,000 implies an average household size of 450,000/186,000=2.4. If the population is 500,000, it implies an average household size of 2.7.
This is a little higher than the south. I said in the podcast that, from memory, the population per household in the south was around 3 persons. You can hear my hesitation as I knew I had not quite got this right (it was based on 1974). Now that I have looked it up, this was indeed an over-estimate. The “housing units of usual residence” in the south in the 2021 census amounted to 354,818. This yields an average household size for residents of 920,700/354,818 = 2.6 for the south.
Registered and unregistered foreign workers
Hatay said that the number of workers with a work permit amounted to 70,000 (and that they account for 70% of private-sector workers). Around 20,000 of these are Asians. What is not known was the number of unregistered workers or over-stayers. One only gets a sense of the number of these when there are occasional amnesties. However, he estimated that the number of non-registered workers was around 25,000-30,000.
TRNC citizens
Hatay mentioned that there were 230,000 citizens of the unrecognized TRNC. Of these, 103,000 had the right to vote in the Republic of Cyprus elections held in the south in 2024. In other words, 103,000 of these were Republic of Cyprus adult citizens. Hatay said around another 30,000-40,000, would be children, so that brings it to about 143,000.
We did not mention during the podcast the Turkish Cypriots with one Turkish parent who are currently de facto denied Republic of Cyprus citizenship.
Let me digress for a moment. The odd thing about this policy is that if you have one Turkish parent and one Republic of Cyprus citizen parent and you were born in Turkey, you get a Republic of Cyprus passport because your DNA did not enter Cyprus through an unrecognized port. If you have one Turkish parent and one Republic of Cyprus citizen parent and you were born in northern Cyprus, you get nothing. Or strictly speaking, you are put on the plausibly denied never-neverland waiting list. I know people in both categories.
Back to the point. Hatay said that the total who could be considered “original Turkish Cypriots” amounted to about 150,000. This implies (see table) that there are around 7,000-17,000 children of mixed marriages currently denied Republic of Cyprus citizenship.
He said that there were around 70,000 TRNC citizens who are of original Turkish origin. This implies that people of Turkish origin account for around 30% of the vote in northern Cyprus. Hatay noted that, contrary to popular belief, they are not a homogenous block when it comes to voting. For example, almost 65% of them voted for the secularist non-Erdogan candidate in the second round of Turkey’s last presidential election.
Others
Of the remainder, Hatay spoke of 25,000-300,000 mainly British retirees with resident permits, then others who included Russians, Iranians, Ukrainians, Israelis and others. He noted that these new arrivals created demand for construction workers, domestic workers and so on, while political developments also attracted people from Turkmenistan as well as wealthier people from Turkey.
We discussed the rumour that there were 50,000 Russians in northern Cyprus. Hatay said this was not true. People had counted the number of Russians arriving in a single year and had forgotten to take into account the departures. (Another time I will show why “50,000” Russians in the south is also not true.)
The bottom line
The bottom line is that, yes, the population of northern Cyprus has grown a great deal in recent years. If the population is indeed 500,000 the population has grown by around 75% since the 2011 census, when the population was counted as 286,257. However, there are no solid grounds to assume that it has ballooned to 1 million or even more.
Of that total, 230,000 people are TRNC citizens, so have the right to vote when they turn 18. Of that 230,000, 150,000, or 65%, are of Turkish Cypriot origin. In other words, yes, Turkish Cypriots are a minority among all people living in northern Cyprus, whether permanently or not. However, they are not (yet) a minority of TRNC citizens or of the voting population.
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Have you seen the rest of the Sapienta Cyprus Reflections series?
· Cyprus tourism: the unlikely biggest-spending country 12 Apr 2024
· Cyprus interest rates: how do they compare? 21 Feb 2024
· Green finance: how will it affect your business? 25 Jan 2024
· How to bring the people into a Cyprus peace process, 18 May 2023
· Three mega trends to define the decade, 11 May 2023
· Cypriots and sanctions: lessons for other professionals in Cyprus, 18 Apr 2023
· Cyprus and security: it’s time to change the toolbox, 14 Feb 2023
· What do we know about Turkish Cypriot banks? 4 Jan 2023
· How much is Russian business worth to Cyprus? 12 Dec 2022
· The amazing Cyprus growth machine 17 Nov 2022
You can find a full list of all posts here.