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Introducing new and improved labour productivity data
Discusses improvements made to the methodology used to compile official measures of labour productivity and unit wage costs. Introduces new measures of 'output per hour' and regional data.
On April 11 the ONS released new and enhanced labour productivity data for the whole economy, production and manufacturing sectors. This is part of a strategy of development of ONS productivity data that recognises the demand for extended measures as well as the need to resolve issues of inconsistency between the numerator and denominator used in the compilation of the figures. New data and a description of changes being made can be found in an article in the May edition of Economic Trends and on the new productivity page of the National Statistics website.
For the first time output per hour and regional measures of productivity are being published. Enhancements are also being made to the methodology used to compile the ‘output per job’ data in order to improve the consistency between the output and input data. Similar changes have been made to the 'unit wage costs' data. The background and implication of these changes are explained in the above mentioned article . The enhancements all affect the productivity denominator. The changes have had a small effect on year on year productivity and unit wage costs growth for the whole economy. However, there have been significant changes to the growth rates for the manufacturing industries. The main effect has been to push up the year on year growth rate for 1998 and 2000 by an average of over 1 percentage point, mainly due to the introduction of the reporting unit denominator.
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