International Comparison of Labor Costs in Manufacturing
German Economic Institute (IW)
In 2010, average hourly labor costs in the West German industry amounted to 36.28 euro. This was 25 percent above the average of the countries compared excluding the new member countries of the EU and other emerging countries. Only in some small countries – Norway, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden and Denmark – labor costs were still higher. In spite of this, favorable exchange rates in the second half of the 1990s and improved cost discipline in the new millennium have reduced Germany’s cost disadvantage considerably since 1995, especially in comparison with the other EU countries. The gap between labor costs in West and East Germany hovers at 40 percent because the growth rate of labor costs in East Germany was only 0.2 percentage points higher than the West German rate over the past decade.
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