Productivity, labour cost and export adjustment: Detailed results for 24 EU countries

As a background document for the Policy Contribution ‘Compositional effects on productivity, labour cost and export adjustment’, this working paper pr

Publishing date: 12 July 2012
Authors: Zsolt Darvas

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As a background document for the Policy Contribution ‘Compositional effects on productivity, labour cost and export adjustment’, this working paper presents detailed results for 24 EU countries on:

• The sectoral changes in the economy;
• The unit labour costs (ULC) based real effective exchange rate (REER) and its main components;
• Export performance.

The ULC-REERs are calculated:

• For the total economy, the business sector (excluding agriculture, construction and real estate activities), and some main sectors;
• Using both actual aggregates and fixed-weight aggregates, as the latter are free from the impacts of compositional changes;
• Against 30 trading partners and against three subsets of trading partners: euro-area, non-euro area EU, non-EU.
• The REERs calculated in this paper are freely downloadable.

About the authors

Zsolt Darvas

Zsolt Darvas is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel and a part-time Senior Research Fellow at the Corvinus University of Budapest. He joined Bruegel in 2008 as a Visiting Fellow, and became a Research Fellow in 2009 and a Senior Fellow in 2013.

From 2005 to 2008, he was the Research Advisor of the Argenta Financial Research Group in Budapest. Before that, he worked at the research unit of the Central Bank of Hungary (1994-2005) where he served as Deputy Head.

Zsolt holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Corvinus University of Budapest where he teaches courses in Econometrics but also at other institutions since 1994. His research interests include macroeconomics, international economics, central banking and time series analysis.