Notes on Statistics of Manpower Costs and Unemployment in Major Industrial Countries

This note outlines some of the problems in measuring short-run changes in manpower costs and lists some of the statistical series now available for major industrial countries. Information about changes in the cost of labour provides a useful complement to data about export prices for analysis of the development of a country's competitive position. Each type of indicator has its own drawbacks. For example, for some exports prices are set by competitive world markets and a change in competitiveness may take the form of a change in relative profits rather than a change in price. Moreover, there are well-known difficulties in comparing national indices for prices or unit/average values. For production costs per unit of output, too, there are problems of compilation. There are also problems of interpretation, particularly over very short periods, because the measures can be very erratic. In the field of unit costs it has become usual to focus attention on changes in manpower costs, variously defined, partly because such costs are the most important, and partly because costs of materials (to the extent that they are set by world prices) tend to move more closely in line as between different countries.