Industrial Labour Costs: An International Comparison
German Economic Institute (IW)
In 2011 labour costs for manufacturing industry in western Germany amounted to € 37.57 per hour. That put western Germany in sixth place in the Labour Cost Ranking maintained by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research (IW). In western Germany industrial labour costs are over a quarter higher than the average for established industrialised countries. The cost disadvantage for Germany as a whole was 6 percent lower since, at € 22.43 per hour, labour costs in eastern Germany were 40 percent below those in the west. On the one hand, cost discipline in Germany has increased considerably in the new millennium. With an annual average rise of just over 2 percent in the period 2000 – 2011, German manufacturing industry had the lowest figure for any country in the European Union. On the other hand, cost expansion in 2011 was again considerably above average.
An International Comparison of Unit Labour Costs: The Cost Competitiveness of German Industry in Times of Considerable Uncertainty
On average, German unit labour costs in 2024 were 22 percent higher than in the 27 other countries considered in this study and 15 percent higher than in the other nations of the eurozone, a disadvantage for which the above-average productivity of German industry was insufficient to compensate.
IW
Corporate insolvencies rise sharply: Cause for concern or normalization after the pandemic years?
The number of enterprise insolvencies in Germany is rising sharply, and there is no end in sight to the increase. The almost two-decade-long downward trend, which culminated in a slump in reported insolvencies during the Covid-19 pandemic, has thus clearly been broken.
IW