Title
The impact of demographic engineering and wartime calamities on agricultural production
from late Ottoman to early Republican Turkey
Authors
Ayça Akarçay Gürbüz*, Nurhan Davutyan**, and Sezgin Polat*
* Galatasaray University, Economics Department, Istanbul
** Kadir Has University, Department of International Trade and Finance, Istanbul
Abstract
The transition from late Ottoman to early Republican rule in Turkey rooted in the historical
process of transition from imperial to nationalist state formation entailed radical changes of
the population structure. In addition to an absolute decrease in population size, the ethnoreligious composition of the population underwent sweeping transformations mainly as a
result of the Armenian massacres and deportations, WWI casualties, population exchange
with Greece and immigration from lost Ottoman territories into Turkey.
The impact of the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic on the populations
involved has been and is being explored from sociological and political history perspectives.
An emerging literature quantitatively estimates the long-term impact of these developments
by regressing Ottoman population data on contemporary outcomes.
Our purpose is to identify the impact of the devastating change in population composition
that occurred during 1914-1923 on economic performance. Although the overall decrease in
population and the consequent GDP decline are documented at the aggregate level, the full
impact of the compositional change and the concomitant loss of physical and human capital
have not been quantitatively assessed yet.
Drawing on the idea that human capital differed across ethno-religious identities and played
an important role in the organization of production (specialization, productivity, externalities)
and trade (networks), we explore district-level population and agricultural statistics of the
late Ottoman and early Republican era to investigate the differentiated impact of these
occurrences on agricultural outcomes.