Translation of "Unit labor costs" in German

Unit labor costs have increased by 10-20% more than in Germany.

After all, higher productivity should bring lower unit labor costs.

At the same time, unit labor costs in France, Italy and Germany increased.

Unit labor costs and the budget situation are also in good shape.

Indeed, despite a 1.3% drop in real wages in 2011, unit labor costs remained unchanged.

Unit labor costs reflect compensation levels and productivity: gains in productivity can offset the effect of wage growth.

Competitiveness, which is usually measured in terms of unit labor costs, is a relative concept.

The resulting rise in output per worker, together with slow wage growth, reduced unit labor costs.

They may think that, in the long run, parities will reflect developments in relative unit labor costs.

With productivity gains remaining subdued, unit labor costs could rise by 2% again this year.

This includes indicators such as the public-sector deficit, unit labor costs, domestic demand and labor productivity.

The moderate increase in unit labor costs has helped maintain the competitiveness of the Austrian economy.

The German solution to this conundrum – keeping wage growth below that of productivity, thereby reducing unit labor costs – took more than a decade to yield results.

Greece thus needs a “National Competitiveness Pact” in which government, opposition, employers, and workers agree on a set of measures that cut unit labor costs by at least 10%.

The mix of measures should be left to Greece to decide, but a cut in unit labor costs of this size is an essential first step for a successful adjustment, and should be a pre-condition for the IMF/EU support package.

Since 2001, unit labor costs have been growing faster than real GDP and employment, undermining the economy’s competitiveness vis-à-vis developing countries.

Persistently weak labor-productivity growth has created a situation in which unit labor costs do not fall, even if real wages remain stagnant or decline.

From 1996 to 2010, unit labor costs in Germany increased by just 8%, and by 13% in France.

Reversing the large differential in unit labor costs that has emerged in the euro’s first decade thus requires not only wage restraint and productivity-enhancing reforms in the south, but also higher wage gains in the north.

Unit labor costs fell in Germany and other parts of the core (as wage growth lagged that of productivity), leading to a real depreciation and rising current-account surpluses, while the reverse occurred in the PIIGS (and Cyprus), leading to real appreciation and widening current-account deficits.

The bitter medicine that Germany and the ECB want to impose on the periphery – the second option – is recessionary deflation: fiscal austerity, structural reforms to boost productivity growth and reduce unit labor costs, and real depreciation via price adjustment, as opposed to nominal exchange-rate adjustment.

In a monetary union, discrepancies in wage growth relative to productivity gains – that is, unit labor costs – will result in a chronic accumulation of trade surpluses or deficits.

These countries are trying to achieve a difficult “internal devaluation” – that is, a reduction in their domestic unit labor costs relative to the eurozone’s stronger economies – while the overall eurozone surplus caused by Northern Europe puts upward pressure on the exchange rate, undermining their competitiveness outside the monetary union.

Lower productivity and higher unit labor costs eroded firms' willingness to hire, leaving Europe with chronically higher unemployment than in the US.

The latter is certainly true, but it does not solve the fundamental problem – that a country’s relative unit labor costs can decline only if another country’s rise.