IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ces/ifosdt/v60y2007i04p54-59.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

International comparison of labour costs: Why Germany cannot afford strong wage increases

Author

Listed:
  • Hans-Werner Sinn

Abstract

According to the Federal Statistical Office or the Institute of the German Economy (DIW), Germany still has the highest hourly wage costs for industrial workers among the major industrialised countries. Only smaller countries such as Denmark, Norway, Belgium or Luxembourg are similarly expensive, but their overall labour productivity is higher. The reason for the extreme German position is high gross wages and not non-wage labour costs. The proportional non-wage labour costs in Germany are considerably below the EU average. The high labour costs in Germany are also not justified by the supposedly superior productivity of the German economy. Germany has the highest labour costs in an international comparison for industrial workers in relation to the amount of its aggregate labour productivity (GDP per working age person). For this reason, despite favourable business activity the number of industrial jobs in Germany continues to decline.

Suggested Citation

  • Hans-Werner Sinn, 2007. "International comparison of labour costs: Why Germany cannot afford strong wage increases," ifo Schnelldienst, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, vol. 60(04), pages 54-59, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ifosdt:v:60:y:2007:i:04:p:54-59
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/ifosd_2007_4_10.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Camille Logeay & Sabine Stephan & Rudolf Zwiener, 2011. "Driving forces behind the sectoral wage costs differentials in Europe," IMK Working Paper 10-2011, IMK at the Hans Boeckler Foundation, Macroeconomic Policy Institute.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J30 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ifosdt:v:60:y:2007:i:04:p:54-59. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ifooode.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.