IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wfo/repoau/y2025i17.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Marked Increase in Relative Unit Labour Costs in 2024

Author

Listed:
  • Benjamin Bittschi

    (WIFO)

  • Birgit Meyer

    (WIFO)

Abstract

In 2024, unit labour costs in Austrian manufacturing increased by 11.8 per cent year on year. This implies a marked deterioration in relative unit labour costs, both versus the trade-weighted average of all trading partners (+5.3 percentage points) and versus EU trading partners (+4.3 percentage points). Compared with Germany, Austria's main trading partner, relative unit labour costs also worsened (+3.2 percentage points). The development relative to the trade-weighted partner average is driven mainly by weaker productivity performance combined with unfavourable exchange rate movements. Relative to Germany and Western Europe, the deterioration is primarily due to more dynamic growth in compensation of employees. Over the past five years, unit labour costs in domestic manufacturing grew by 0.8 percentage points per year faster than the average of all trading partners, and by 1.5 and 1.7 percentage points faster than in Germany and Western Europe, respectively. Due to government support measures during the COVID-19 pandemic and to cushion high inflation, the results for the past five years should still be interpreted with caution.

Suggested Citation

  • Benjamin Bittschi & Birgit Meyer, 2025. "Marked Increase in Relative Unit Labour Costs in 2024," WIFO Reports on Austria, WIFO, issue 17, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:wfo:repoau:y:2025:i:17
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.wifo.ac.at/?p=438411
    File Function: abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    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:wfo:repoau:y:2025:i:17. 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: Florian Mayr (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/wifooat.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.