EMPLOYMENT IN THE MARKET ECONOMY IN ... - Eurostat - Europa

Chapter 3 — Labour costs and value-added
The SBS data on labour costs and the LCS
The SBS data on labour costs relate to the cost of personnel employed
in businesses. As such, they include non-wage labour costs — social
contributions paid by employers in particular — as well as wages and
salaries. They are on a similar basis to the data collected as part of the
periodic Labour Cost Survey (LCS), conducted by national statistical
institutes for Eurostat every four years, which provide details of the
main components which make up overall labour costs (basic wages,
overtime and other bonuses, non-wage labour costs and so on).
Unlike the LCS, however, the SBS uses the enterprise as the statistical
unit of classification rather than the local unit. This difference in the basis
of classification may mean that the LCS may assign the local units of
an enterprise to a different sector of activity than the enterprise itself, if
their main activity differs from that of the enterprise. While data from
both surveys are disaggregated to the NACE 2-digit level and relate to
the same NACE Rev.1 sectors of activity, the use of local units instead
of enterprises to perform this disaggregation may, therefore, produce
different results. In addition, unlike the SBS, the LCS does not include
enterprises with under 10 people employed, or more precisely, Member
States are not required to cover these in the data collection.
The coverage of employees may also differ in that management staff
and sales representatives, for example, are excluded from the LCS but
may be included in the SBS. It is possible as well that the average number
of employees counted as being in work over the year may vary between
the two sources, especially as regards temporary workers. The
LCS, moreover, includes the cost of training (other than those for apprentices)
and direct subsidies, which are not included in the SBS
data, but both of which tend to be small.
A comparison of average annual labour costs per employee as reported
by the two surveys for 2000 is shown in Table 25.
they were significantly higher in most countries,
including in the new Member States. In construction,
the average cost of labour was generally
lower than in other parts of industry (Graph 22).
Within manufacturing, labour costs were highest
in chemicals and fuel in all countries, followed, in
most cases, by transport equipment. Average labour
costs were also relatively high in other engineering
sectors, while the reverse was the case in
basic manufacturing (where labour costs were
only just over 70% of the average level in engineering).
This was especially true in textiles and
clothing, where labour costs were under 60% of
the average level in manufacturing as a whole.
These differences reflect the different average
skill levels of the labour employed.
A similar pattern of labour costs differentials is
evident for most countries, though the extent of
the variation between sectors differs significantly.
In Ireland, therefore, average labour
costs in engineering were only some 3% higher
than in basic manufacturing and in Denmark,
Finland and the Netherlands, only around 10%
higher, while in Germany, they were almost
40% higher. (Labour costs in engineering were
lower than in basic manufacturing in Luxembourg,
but only few people — only some 5
thousand — were employed in engineering.)
The difference was even bigger in Lithuania, at
over 50%. In the other new Member States,
22 Average annual labour costs per employee in industry, 2001
70
60
50
40
EUR (thousand)
Mining, quarrying (C)
Manufacturing (D)
Construction (F)
70
60
50
40
30
30
20
20
10
10
0
BG RO LT LV EE SK CZ HU PL PT SI MT CY ES IT IE EU25 EU15 DK UK FR FI NL AT SE DE LU BE
0
EL: n.a. ; IE, CY: 2000
Source: Eurostat, SBS
49