Seoul, Dec 10 (IANS): Four out of 10 newlyweds in South Korea did not have any children as of 2019, reflecting a growing social trend of delaying getting married and reproducing, statistical office data showed on Thursday.

Out of 998,365 first-time, couples who had been legally married for five years through November 1, 2019, 42.5 per cent had no children, Xinhua news agency reported citing figures from Statistics Korea.

It was up 2.3 percentage points compared to the 2018 data.

A rising number of the country's younger generation delayed marriage or gave up getting married and having baby due to economic difficulty and higher housing price, leading to a chronically low birthrate.

The number of newborns averaged 0.63 among double-income newlyweds and 0.79 among couples with a single breadwinner each.

The average number of babies born to newly married pairs without home was 0.65, while the figure for newlyweds possessing home stood at 0.79.

The number of newlywed couples without home was 570,168, or 57.1 per cent of the total, as of 2019.

It was up 0.9 percentage points from a year earlier.

Out of the newlyweds, 85.8 per cent borrowed money from financial institutions as of 2019, up 0.7 percentage points from the previous year.

The newly married couples earned a yearly average income of 57,070,000 won ($52,570) in 2019, up 3.7 per cent from the previous year.