The recent development in the Slovak economy erased a significant competitive advantage of manufacturing - low labour cost. The paper analyses the driving factors of rising unit labour costs in the manufacturing sector. The paper aims to explain why the unexpectedly rapid loss of traditional...

The objective of the article is to evaluate the impact of personnel costs on apparent labour productivity by employing the 1995-2018 panel data of the manufacturing industry in 27 European countries. The methods of independent samples t-test, correlation analysis, Granger causality test, unit...

We examine the trajectories of the real unit labour costs (RULCs) in a selection of Eurozone economies. Strong asymmetries in the convergence process of the RULCs and its components-real wages, capital intensity, and technology-are uncovered through decomposition and cluster analyses. In the...

Unit labor cost (ULC) is defined as labor compensation per value added. It captures the cost competitiveness of industries and countries. As labor compensation is wage multiplied by hours worked or number of people employed, it is easy to show that ULC is wage divided by labor productivity....

In this paper we propose a new small area estimation methodology aimed at the estimation of Value Added, Labor Cost and related competitiveness indicators for subsets of the population of Italian small and medium sized manufacturing firms classified according to geographical region, industrial...