The Greek government on Thursday announced new government policies to boost the country’s lagging birth rates. Greece is already spending about €1 million per year on pro-child measures.
The new measures, intended to make it more affordable to have children, include tax breaks for new parents, vouchers to pay for child care, pension increases, social contribution reductions, and a raised minimum wage. The plan, which was originally intended to be presented in May, also includes affordable housing for young people and financial support for assisted reproduction.
The 2024 fertility rate for Greece is 1.264 births per woman—a 0.08% increase from 2023. In 2022, births hit a 92-year low, driven by the debt crisis, austerity, emigration, and changing youth attitudes.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has called the declining birthrate a national threat and a “ticking time bomb” for pensions. According to Reuters, some villages haven’t seen a birth in years. In Ormenio, one of Greece’s poorest villages, two-thirds of the 300 residents are now over 70, the village president noted, though it was once full of children.
Experts and politicians alike question whether the new measures will manage to turn things around. Deputy Finance Minister Thanos Petralias told the media on Thursday that “It is a given that the demographic problem … cannot simply be solved by benefits and cash incentives,” but that improvements in education and health care, along with higher incomes and better work-life balance conditions would also be required.
Byron Kotzamanis, a leading Greek demography expert, said he does not believe the government policies will have any “dramatic impact” on births.
Greece has still not recovered from the 2009-2014 austerity measures imposed by the EU, the European Central Bank, and the IMF that destroyed one-quarter of its economy, leading to massive unemployment and many young Greeks simply leaving the country.
Sofia Zacharaki, minister for social cohesion and family affairs, told Reuters earlier this year, “If I were to tell you that any given minister at any given ministry … can reverse the trend, it would be a lie.” Still, she said, “we need to keep trying.”
The average birth rate in the EU in 2023 was 1.5 births per woman, with birth rates varying between countries from 1.14 in Andorra to 2.71 in the Faroe Islands.
