Compare methods

	Dependency Ratio	Total Fertility Rate
Field	Demography	Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1956	2001
Originator	Standard demographic practice (United Nations / national statistical offices)	Classical demographic index (formalized by Preston, Heuveline & Guillot)
Type	Ratio summarizing the age structure of economic dependency	Period summary fertility index synthesizing age-specific fertility rates
Seminal source	Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes. Blackwell. ISBN: 9781557864512	Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes. Blackwell. ISBN: 9781557864512
Aliases	Age dependency ratio, Youth and old-age dependency ratio, Total dependency ratio, Bağımlılık Oranı	TFR, Period total fertility rate, Sum of age-specific fertility rates, Toplam Doğurganlık Hızı
Related	4	4
Summary	The age dependency ratio is a simple summary measure of a population's age structure that expresses the number of people in 'dependent' age groups — children and the elderly — relative to those of working age, conventionally per 100 working-age persons. It is split into a youth dependency ratio and an old-age dependency ratio, and it is among the most widely used demographic indicators of the potential economic burden an age structure places on its productive population.	The total fertility rate (TFR) is the central period measure of fertility in demography: the average number of children a woman would bear over her lifetime if she experienced, at each age, the age-specific fertility rates observed in a given year. Computed by summing age-specific fertility rates across the reproductive ages, the TFR removes the influence of population age structure and gives a single, intuitive figure — children per woman — that is comparable across populations and over time.