Greece’s aging population, low birth rates pose threat to future stability

According to an article posted on its website, CNBC features that Greece is facing a demographic crisis that is significantly impacting its future. 

Saint George café in Lasta, a remote village in Greece’s Peloponnese region, is now operated on an honor system — customers simply help themselves to a drink, leave a donation, and absorb the nostalgic atmosphere of a fading era. 

The photos of vibrant village life on the walls contrast sharply with the desolate reality outside, where an empty square, an abandoned school, and crumbling houses offer a haunting glimpse of what the future may hold for a country facing the risk of population collapse.

Lasta is just one of many "ghost" towns and villages across Greece, where depopulation, economic hardship, and mass emigration have left their marks. 

Economists warn that the country’s shrinking population is creating significant challenges, especially as Greece emerges from years of crisis, with fewer young people available to sustain the economy in the long term.

"While Greece is experiencing solid growth for now, looking ahead, with fewer people to do the work, it will be difficult to sustain," Bert Colijn, chief economist at ING, told CNBC in a phone interview.

Greece has one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe, with a rate of 1.3, half of what it was in 1950 and well below the 2.1 needed for population replacement. 

In 2023, the country recorded just over 71,400 births, the lowest figure since records began nearly a century ago, marking a 6 per cent decrease from 2022. Greece now experiences roughly one birth for every two deaths, and the proportion of the population over 65 is nearly double that of those aged 0 to 14.

This has led Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to warn of an "existential" threat to Greek society, as the country is more vulnerable than most to the broader demographic changes affecting developed nations.

“The truth is that today our people are among the most elderly in Europe,” Mitsotakis remarked last year during a Greek demographic conference.

The issue is impacting certain areas of the Greek mainland and its extensive archipelago more severely than others.

“This population decline is not manifested equally throughout the country,” Mitsotakis continued. “It has peaks in specific areas, and this means that national strategies alone are insufficient; local measures are also needed, with the overall demographic collapse becoming an existential gamble for our future.”

The effects of this decline are most apparent in the growing number of ghost towns and villages—places that are either completely deserted or have only a handful of residents, as local populations either leave or gradually fade away. Although it's difficult to precisely measure the number of such locations due to their often remote nature, recent estimates suggest that nearly 200 towns and villages are now entirely abandoned.

By Naila Huseynova