Advancing maternal age in Greece aggravates demographic problem

Women in crisis-riven Greece are giving birth at an ever later age, aggravating the country's demographic problem with a direct impact on the local labor market, experts told Xinhua on Friday.

A new research published by the University of Thessaly in central Greece indicates that the average age of mothers giving birth in Greece has been much later than in most other European countries, shifting from 26.1 years in 1980 to 31.5 years in 2017.

Dimitrios Karkanis, researcher behind the report, explained that the phenomenon is mainly driven by the need for quality of life instead of quantity of family members, due to changes in social and economic standards.

Statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2016 also showed that Greece has the ninth highest childbirth age among the 45 states monitored by the organization, with the...